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Show THE RICH COUNTY REAPER, RANDOLPH, UTAH Trades Eye for Her Life STORY OF PLATINUM t peck of apples, 15 loaves of bread, 150 pounds of hay. Short legs make him stumble so easily that low flimsy fences are protection against hippo marauding visits. When the husky herds grow numerous enough to trample crops along cultivated riversides, they are transferred from the protected list to the black list. White hunters track them down, finding them about as much sport as a frightened cow. Natives kill them for food, feasting on hippo bacon and smoked tongue, rendering the fat into a pure Nestling in the arms of Nurse Betty Parkin is little Helaine Judith oil that doesnt turn rancid for Colan, Chicago, victim of glioma, a dread eye disease. A debate of days to decide whether to operate at the expense of blindness, or permit the years. Mild manners and habits dread disease to take little Helaines life was settled when after a con- place the hippo amongsteady the respectis An made ference of scientists, the left eye was removed. attempt being able bourgeois of the jungle and to save the right eye. surely among the favorites of the zoo. His popularity as a captive was well under way in 293 B. C. in the zoo of Octavius. Barnum billed him as Behemoth of the Bible. The pygmy hippopotamuses which range through Liberia on Africas west coast are vest pocket editions similar to fossils found on Madagascar and Sicily. Naturalists wonder whether the small size was This a of a pig has nightmare Huge Beast Is Only Living spongy skin with a network of fine a special adaptation to island surRelic of Stone Age. creases. It is a rich hue of rare roundings, and why this bantam model now lives only in Liberia and bteefsteak, shading into blue-gra- y a of C. D. Birth and dappled with chocolate. His zoos. Washington, at d face is shaped like a violon-cell- o baby hippopotamus ORCHIDS FOR MARION the National Zoological park in gabled at the top with a pair of the that and the hope alert eyes and gnarled at either end Washington, tiny infant will survive, focuses at- of the nose ridge with knobs of eyes tention on one of the queerest wild and nostrils. Stubby legs and short creatures in captivity. The newly flattened tail are dwarfed by his arrived hippo is a pygmy, and if bulk. it reaches maturity will, like its One of his odder features is the mother, weigh only about 450 bloody sweat, a reddish oil which This contrasts with a pounds. pours from the pores under weight of 4,800 to 6,000 pounds for stress of pain or hippos excitement. the ordinary adult hippdpotamus. This is one of Growing as rare as the vanish- natures greatest ofa hogs relic of living antiques, American buffalo, that vanishing ing the Stdne age. It may be the only big brute left which retains its face and figure from the days when preTHINKING IT OVER historic savages of southeastern spears at it along the banks of the Thames. Remains indicate that the hippo once roamed through Europe feet and even India. His four-toe- d have beat a slow, thunderous retreat before advancing civilization to the dank heart of Africa, which is now the bewildered hippos last stand. He lurks among the reedy margins of lakes and rivers from the latitude of Timbuktu south to Marion Talley,- dainty star of the the latitude of Durban, already opera and radio, is planning to use growing noticeably scarce around her spare time to raise orchids at the edges of the continent. her home near Hollywood, Calif. It takes seven years to grow the costly By day the hippo hides his homein or face marshes ly shady gallops flowers from seeds to blossoms, the along river bottoms with whalelike price of which ranges from $4 upn orchid plant excursions to the surface to spout ward. A for air every five or ten minutes. costs from $45 to $5,000, depending No matter how cumbersome on on the variety. Marion is shown exland, he dives and swims with Olym- amining an orchid, one of the variety that she may have in her colpic skill. Hiiopopotamus Is One of Queerest Wild Creatures nine-poun- - full-grow- No Dainty Appetite. "Catering to their gigantic appeOne of the very few bearded chess tite, which is exclusively vegetariplayers in competition, L. Prins of an, is a hippo size job. In capHolland was confronted with a dif- tivity, a baby can drink 15 pints of ficult problem during the Interna- milk and squeal for more. An adult tional Chess congress at Margate, can stow away in his ten feet of a dozen, bunches of carrots, England, recently. Chess experts stomach n heads of cabbage, a from many countries matched their a skill in the ancient game. half-doze- lection. New Uses for Feathers Chicken feathers, New York. once a wasted of the poultry industry, are now utilized by-prod- extensively, the American Poultry Journal reports. Feathers are used extensively in millinery and for dusters. The Ump Is Always Right African, the hippopotamus, receives protection from several governments of middle and southern Afsays the National Georica, graphic society. Wardens help the hippo escape the native steak plat ters. Left to himself, the cumber some creature is about as dan gerous as a grand piano. In spite of his successful zoo ca behind reer as a bars, the hippo is only a barnyard brute at heart in short, a pig. Halfconpig at least, says the scientist, sidering the short , legs, four-toe- d foot, rasping grunt, rooting muzzle observes and tusks. the layman with a measuring eye. is outranked For this super-porkfor sheer bulk by the elephant alone among land animals. Parking space for a standard model hippo would need to be about 14 feet long. The average hippos hide, two inphes thick, is draped around three tons of animal. Horse of the River. River swine- was the ancient Egyptians name for him. A visiting Greek three centuries B. C. The baseball season Is still In Its infancy, bat oratory has already dubbed him horse of the river, and Che Greek for that phrase hippobegan. Here yon see Manager Bill Terry of the New York Giants using potamus became his title, a name up some long power protesting a decision of Umpire Barr. As usual, the umpire failed to lose the argument. as unwieldly as his frame. very-wild-bea- st lf, er - Platinum Has Many Uses in Modern Science, Industry and Warfare Prepared by National Geographic Society. Washington, D. C. WNU Service. IF YOU were to ask a bride her platinum wedding ring has in common with armament races, she probably would stare at you in bewilderment. Yet the same metal that goes into her marital badge also is an important element in the manufacture of munitions. It serves the armament maker in fine fuse wire for torpedoes and indirectly, it acts as chemical agent in the production of nitric and sulphuric acids, used together in making shells; explosives. A seldom-tol- d tale of the World war concerns a dangerous and diffi- cult mission of a young American engineer in Russia, who, just before the United States entered the conflict in 1917, undertook to transport nearly a ton of platinum from (now Leningrad) to Wash- Pet-rogr- ad ington. Crossing the Atlantic was too uncertain. So, armed with a couriers pass, he set out, with his boxes of treasure marked embassy documents, to make the long trek across Siberia to Vladivostok and thence over the Pacific. With travel complicated by the Russian revolution, he outwitted secret agents and bandit raids. Time and again he met peril, delay, and disappointment as he rode in trains jammed with fretting, sweating humanity. But the platinum came through! Several nations have considered platinum coinage, made patterns and trial pieces, and then abandoned the scheme. Once Called Unripe Gold. Valuable as platinum is now considered, its practical career has been, brief. Unripe gold," Colombian Indians once called it. Prospecting for gold, they used to toss white grains of to platinum back into the rivers ripen into the yellow metal! In Tsarist Russia, over a century ago, a silversmith was hanged because he substituted platinum for silver. It was the man in the laboratory who put platinum on the worlds economic map. Remembering the excitement that swept San Francisco when gold was discovered and the sensation of the Comstock Silver Lode, the arrival in England of the first crude Colombian platinum, in 1741, may seem a little dull. Not so to chemists and physicists of the time. Quietly they set to work deciphering the mysteries of this stuff that one of them called white gold, or the seventh metal. It was not an entirely unknown quantity. Back in the Sixteenth century a queer infusible metal had been observed in Mexico and what is now Panama. Later Don Antonio de Ulloa had mentioned plati-n- a (little silver), described in his account of South American adventures as a stone of such resistance that it cannot easily be broken by a blow on a steel anvil. Its ' resistance to scientific analysis was also great. Years passed before it was learned that platinum, like other metals, could be melted if made hot enough. In the Eighteenth century someone rolled a bit of the metal into foil and drew it into wire a great feat then, and the first faltering achievestep toward present-da- y ment, when one troy ounce of platinum can be stretched into a virtually invisible wire nearly , 11,000 miles long. The first crude platinum crucible appeared, pointing to its wide use for the laboratory. But it was late in the 1700s before they knew how to make a workable ingot, a necessary preliminary to the widespread modern industry. The first bar is credited to French chemist working for Charles III of-- Spain, who received a patent for his discovery in 1783. Chabaneaus biographer says that the king himself, a dabbler in science, used to visit the scientists workshop and help with experiments. Once Chabaneau in a rage at the apparent inconsistency of platinum ore, threw precious solutions, apparatus and all out of the window, vowing never to touch the stuff again. Finally, however, success! And to demonstrate the amazing weight of this metal in pure form, he played a little joke. cube Placing the shiny four-inc- h on a table, he asked a friend to raise it. The man could not. You have fastened it down, he said. But Chabaneau lifted it a weight of about 50 pounds. Chabaneaus friend would have been still more astonished could he have followed the career of this metal into the future. For platinum itself, science was to discover, does not stand alone. It belongs to a family of six allied metals, each with its own peculiar and valuable properties for art and industry. It was platinums combination with these other metals that caused the inconsistencies which upset Chabaneaus calculasolid-platinu- m Cha-banea- u, tions. Other chemists, too, found experiments contradictory. Sometimes the platinum substance would become strangely brittle; again, to their surprise, it would bum (depending, as we know now, on how it was alloyed). At last, however, the group stood clear. And as palladium, rhodium, osmium, iridium, and ruthenium appeared in addition to platinum, like rabbits out of the empty hat of a vaudeville magician, infant industries reached for the shining boon. Plays Vital Part in Industry Fifty years ago, we had no radio no transcommunication, no continental or oceanic telephone, to e name but a few miracles in which the platinum metals play a small but vital part. In airplanes now platinum is standard contact metal for n magnetos. Fountain pens became practical when an alloy of two of the platinum group was found to make a wear and point. A farmer who may be indifferent to platinflm bracelets can still, appreciate platinums agency as a catalyst in tnaking synthetic nitrates for fertilizer. In your electric refrigerator and thermostat unit a thin strip of metal changes shape as temperature rises or falls, making or breaking electrical contact and thus starting or shutting off the motor. Since platinum offers high resistance to hot electric sparks, it is particularly useful here for conX-ra- y, man-mad- high-tensio- acid-resisti- heat-contr- tact points. ol , From obsolete telephone equipment thousands of ounces of platinum, palladium and gold are salvaged annually minute quantities from each piece. - After the metal has been put through special processes, back into service it goes in the. form of more contact points. Platinum and palladium are important factors in radio and telephony, r Dentists use a large proportion of our annual supply in alloys for bridgework, foil, and fillings. long-distan- |