Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 89.djvu/527

 Popular Science Monthly

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��A Slab of Sandstone Seventy-Five Million Years Old

A SLAB of sandstone stands on edge in the bed of an Ohio stream. It has peculiar markings made in times past by ripples when the stone was soft sand. The layer of rock from which this skib was broken extends far back into the bank of the stream, and comes to light again in a quarry a mile distant. In fact when the ripple marks were formed it was the soft sand of an ocean shore. In short the pictured slab is a piece of what geologists call Berea sandstone, formed from ancient sediments at least se\'cnty-five million years ago. To-day the Berea sand- stone beds are of importance because great quantities of oil and gas are found in them.

��A Curious Egg Shaped Like a Dumb-Bell

THE. freak egg shown in the pic- ture on the right was laid by an ordinary' Leghorn hen. When first laid it was a per- fect dumb-bell in shape, having two

���The inner bone formation of a whale's ear picked up by a Scandinavian fisherman

yolks, one on each end, connected by a sac enclosing the albuminous portion.

��A slab of sand- rippled Berea sandstone of practically in- calculable age

The freak egg compared in size with a normal egg laid by the very same hen

��Would You Recognize the Ear- Bone of a Whale If You Saw One?

HERE is an actual photograph of a natural object. Does it remind you of a human face, exaggerated as in a cartoonist's drawing?

But it is only one of those freaky resemblances so often seen in natural objects or formations.

The photograph represents one of the ear-bones of a whale, an object about three times the size of a hen's egg. A whale has a most complicated ear mechanism, composed of several bones and ossicles of different sizes, inter- locked by curious angles and facets. Sometimes one of these bones is cast up on the beach. The photograph repre- sents such an ear-bone picked up by a fisherman on some sandy beach on the Scandinavian peninsula; and by a curious coincident it looks most like the type of face sometimes seen among the lower classes of Scandinavians.

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