Jason, the Argonaut

Jason taking the Golden Fleece

   Jason, in Greek legend the leader of the Argonautic expedition. Jason was the son of Aeson, a king of Thessaly. Aeson became tired of his responsibilities and gave up the kingdom to his brother, Pelias, on condition that he would yield it to Jason when he became old enough to reign.
   When Jason was grown, he demanded his rights. Pelias was unwilling to yield the crown, but he was a wily individual and laid plans for getting rid of Jason. He told the young man that he was ready to give up the kingdom, but that it would be much wiser if he, Jason, should perform some deed of valor by which he could win wealth and fame before he settled down to the duties of ruling.
   Pelias suggested an expedition in search of the golden fleece, which he said was in Colchis on the eastern shore of the Black Sea. Jason thought well of his master's plan and fitted out an expedition.
   He built himself a ship that would hold fifty men. Jason won both the gold¬en fleece and a wife, Medea, but he was not very happy with her. She restored his father to youth by her enchantments, but she slew his uncle. Jason finally deserted her for another. Medea, in rage at his unfaithfulness, killed her children, set fire to the palace, and departed never to return.
   Ja¬son, according to some accounts, killed him¬self soon after. Another version of the story is that he lost his life accidentally.

What is jasper?

Jasper pebble

   Jasper is a stone used for decorative purposes. Different varieties differ in color; it is found in dark green, grayish blue, brownish black, and reddish brown. Like jade it can be beautifully polished, and is used for vases, small boxes, belt pins, and like articles. It is also in demand for pillars, table tops and interior finshings. Owing to its strength, jasper is frequently used for the walls of buildings. Agate jasper is jasper in layers with chalcedony; this variety is also known as ribbon jasper; the yellow and brown varieties are known as Egyptian jasper.

   Jasper is found in many parts of the United States, the most generally known quarries being at Pipestone, Minnesota, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and several places in Colorado.

Who built the missions?

Tumacacori Mission

   Scattered over southwestern United States there are a number of old Spanish missions. They all look much like those in the pictures. These missions were built over 200 years ago by Catholic priests.
   Places for the missions were chosen carefully. They were built in spots with good soil and plenty of water for irrigation. Soon each mission was the center of olive and orange orchards and fields of grain. The buildings had thick white walls and small Windows. The roofs were of red tile. The buildings suited a hot, dry climate well. Many houses in the southwest today are built in the same style.
   When the missions were founded, there were almost no white people in the region. But there were many Indians. The Spanish priests invited the Indians to worship with them. They also taught the Indians how to build better houses and how to make beautiful things of leather and silver. Once in a while at a mission there was a cheerful fiesta.
   The great days of the missions ended in 1822. The region was not yet a part of the United States. The Spanish priests were driven away by the Mexicans. The mission fields and some of the buildings were allowed to go to ruin. But some of the build¬ings still stand. They are being well cared for today.

San Esteban Mission

Where does salt come from?

sea salt

   Salt comes from mines, from wells, from springs, from salt lakes, and from the sea.
   The tunnels and rooms of a salt mine sparkle as if they had been dug through ice. Miners, using drills, cut the solid salt away in great glistening chunks. Then power shovels scoop it up and load it into little railroad cars which haul it out of the mine.
   A salt well is very different from an ordinary well. It is a hole in the ground all right, but pumps force water down into it! This water dissolves salt which is buried in the earth. Then the salty water, called brine, is pumped back out and boiled in pans. The water evaporates, leaving the salt in the pans.
   Sometimes an underground stream flows through a bed of salt. When it comes to the surface it is a salt spring. Brine from these springs and from salt lakes and from the sea, can be boiled to make salt. More often. the naturally salty water is allowed to stand in the sun in big shallow reservoirs or ponds. The sun dries the water away, and the salt stays behind.
   In the old days salt was scarce. Only those people who lived near the sea could get it easily. But everybody needed it to preserve meat and fish because they had no refrigerators in those days. Salt was so valuable that it was used as money in some places

Sigmund Freud - biographical facts

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was an Austrian psychiatrist and originator of psychoanalysis, born of Jewish parents in Freiburg, Moravia. Brought to Vienna at the age of four, he remained there—except for brief intervals devoted to study, lecturing, and conferences elsewhere—until 1938. That year, Freud, by then in his 80's, moved to London, the Nazis having annexed Austria as part of the Third Reich and confiscated most of Freud's belongings. He might have been placed in a concentration camp or killed had not the intercession of prominent persons in England, France, and the United States enabled him to leave Nazi territory.

Having graduated from the medical school at the University of Vienna, studied physiology at Vienna's General Hospital, and shared in the discovery of the anesthetic properties of cocaine, Freud might have devoted his life to the practice of medicine if he had not come under the influence of Charcot, the great French neuropsychiatrist. Returning to Vienna in 1886 after a year's study under Charcot at the Salpétriére Hospital in Paris, he became a
general practitioner of medicine but specialized in neuropathology. Shortly thereafter he became greatly interested in a case of hysteria in a young girl being treated by Josef Breuer. The temporary relief effected through catharsis, or hypnotizing the girl and persuading her while under hypnosis to recall the circumstances under which her symptoms of hysteria originated, impressed Freud tremendously. It led Freud to investigate and think through closely the problem of hysteria, and in 1895, in collaboration with Breuer, he published in German a book which years later was brought out in English under the title Selected Papers on Hysteria.
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Hydroelectric power in the United States

Hydroelectric Power 
   Electricity generated by moving water from dams is called hydroelectric power. The sun provides heat energy that evaporates surface water from oceans, lakes, and streams. The water returns to the earth as rain or snow. Reservoirs behind dams built across river valleys collect and store the water.
The mechanical energy of the moving water as it leaves the dam is converted to electricity. The amount of kinetic energy in the falling water depends on the speed and the volume of the water available to turn the generators. About 10 percent of the electricity used in the United States is produced by hydroelectric power.
Generating electricity with water power is efficient and clean. Little energy is lost, and no pollutants are produced. Another advantage of hydroelectric power is its low cost. Although dams are expensive to build, hydroelectric plants have low operating costs.
   The lakes, or reservoirs, behind the dams also provide water storage for irrigation and serve as recreational areas. However, building a dam changes a river forever. It floods low-lying areas upstream, destroying farmland and wildlife habitats. Dams may also block the migration and survival of some kinds of fish, such as salmon.

What makes glaciers?

   Glaciers are rivers of ice. They actually flow, and they really are made of ice. Wherever glaciers are found, the average temperature for the whole year is below freezing. This means that ice can last, year after year, even if some of it melts in summer. But where does the ice come from in the first place?

   It comes from snow which can change into ice in two different ways. When the sun melts the surface of snow, water seeps down and melts more snowflakes underneath. But the temperature deep in the snow is still below freezing. When the seeping water reaches this super-cold snow, it changes to ice.

   But this is not the main way in which snow becomes glacial ice. Snow piles up so deep that the individual snowflakes are pressed close together. When this happens, the tiny snow crystals begin to act according to a special habit they have. The smaller snowflakes join larger ones. The result is new and larger snowflakes or crystals. These crystals then join still larger ones, and so on until solid crystals the size of marbles have been formed. Sometimes in very big glaciers the crystals grow to the size of baseballs.

   Glaciers would be mountains of ice getting higher every year if gravity didn't pull on them and make them move downward from the places where they form. Glaciers move slowly, compared to rivers of water, but they do move.

Profitable uses for agricultural wastes

Until about the outbreak of World War II, nearly all the cigarette paper consumed in the United States was made by factories in France from old linen rags collected in Central Europe. The owner of one of the largest French factories was an American citizen; his customers were America's to¬bacco companies. Perhaps he saw that the second World War was coming. At any rate, several years before the oulbreak of the war, he decided to bring his business to the United States.
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The first civilizations

ancient ziggurat

   Civilizatíon is a word which means 'living in a city'. The first citíes grew up in the Fertile Crescent, an area which ran northwards from the Persian Gulf, through present-day Iraq and round to Egypt.
   The earliest civilizations were those of Sumer, Babylonia and Assyria, all in Iraq. The ruins of many of these cities have been found, such as those of Ur, birthplace of Abraham. These cities had ziggurats, great towering temples. The ancient Egyptians carried the ziggurat idea further by building pyramids, huge stone structures which served as tombs.
   Civilization spread gradually northwards through Palestine and the Bible lands. The first civilization in Europe was that of the Minoans, who lived on the island of Crete in the Mediterranean. They are famous for the Minotaur, a mythical monster, and for the dangerous sport of bull-leaping - jumping over a bull by holding on to its horns. The Cretan civilization was closely connected with that of mainland Greece. The Greeks were very clever people. They included some of the greatest architects and sculptors the world has ever known, and also some of the finest thinkers. Philosophy, the science of thought, and democracy, government by the people, were both evolved by the Greeks.
   The Romans, originating at Rome in Italy, were mighty soldiers and conquerors. They built up an empire covering a large part of Europe and North Africa. They were fond of sports such as chariot races, and fights between men known as gladiators. The Chinese civilization is also very old. The Chinese built their Great Wall to keep out invaders at about the time the Romans were creating their empire.

What makes lightning?

   Lightning is really electricity — lots of electricity that jumps through the air in huge sparks.
You can make little jumping sparks of electricity if you rub a cat's fur or comb your hair with a hard rubber comb. Probably the giant sparks of lightning are caused in somewhat the same way.
   Lightning sparks start in the clouds. Great winds blow through a rain cloud and whip the raindrops around and tear some of them apart. Tremendous action goes on, and this action electrifies the cloud. Weather-men don't know exactly how it happens, but great charges of electricity build up. Suddenly there comes a flash. The lightning jumps from one part of the cloud to another. Or it leaps between the cloud and the earth.
   Lightning usually seems like one enormous quivering spark, but it is really several sparks. It travels in a zigzag path, and that is what gives it a jagged look.
   If you could stretch electric cords from the ground to the clouds, there wouldn't be any lightning. The electricity would run through the cords into the earth. Of course, we can't plug cords into the clouds. But people often do have metal lightning rods that stick up above houses and barns. The electricity jumps from the cloud to the rod. Instead of hitting the building, it runs into the earth.

How does a thermometer work?

   The thermometer on your wall is a glass tube with a silvery or red or blue line inside. The silvery line is a liquid called mercury. Since the tube is hollow, the mercury can move. It goes up as the room gets warm and down when the room turns cold. A thermometer with a colored line contains a different liquid that behaves in the same way.
    The marks and numbers on the tube measure the height of the mer¬cury. If it shrinks down to the 32-mark, you will be shivering, and water will turn to ice. But when the mercury goes up as high as 90, you feel very hot.
Why does the line of mercury grow taller or shorter? Like everything else, mercury is made of tiny particles called molecules. The mer¬cury molecules are always moving, bumping into each other and bouncing away. Even when the silvery line remains steady inside the tube, the molecules are shifting around and around. Heat makes them move faster. The fast-bouncing molecules shove each other farther and farther apart. So the mercury takes up more space, and it rises in the tube.
   When the molecules get cold they move more slowly. Now they don't need so much bouncing space. They draw closer together, and the mercury goes down.

The spectacular fireworks

   The best part of a Fourth of July celebration, many people think, is the fireworks. No Fourth would be com¬plete without them.
   Roman candles are a common kind of fireworks. They are made in this way: the inside of a hollow tube is divided into several separate little rooms. In the center of each room there is a hollow ball made of powder that will burn. The powder has gum and shellac mixed with it to hold it in shape. It has chemicals mixed with it to give it a pretty color when it burns. Packed around the ball there is loose powder. When the loose powder is set on fire, it explodes and shoots the ball out of the tube of the Roman candle. The powder in first one room and then another explodes. So one ball after another comes out. The balls themselves burn after they have been shot up into the air.
   There are fireworks of many other kinds. But they are all made of the same kinds of chemicals and other materials.
   Fireworks are dangerous. Most Ameri¬can cities now have laws that keep stores from selling them. Nowadays, instead of having fireworks in their back yards on the Fourth of July, people go to see a fire-works display at some place where there are men who can handle fireworks safely.

How does a magnet work?

   If you experiment with a magnet, you will find that it picks up some things but not others. It picks up nails but not gold rings. It picks up needles but not silver spoons. Your magnet is made of a metal called iron, and it will only pick up other things that have a lot of iron in them.
   To see how your magnet works, you have to imagine some things first. Imagine that you could cut it in half. Scientists have done so, and they find that they get two separate magnets. Cut one of the halves in two and you get two more magnets. Now imagine you could go on dividing a piece of your iron magnet until you get the smallest possible bit of the metal. This smallest bit is a molecule. Even this molecule is a magnet, too! Every iron molecule is a tiny magnet. It pulls other iron molecules toward itself.
   If all iron molecules are magnets, then why isn't a nail a magnet? Why can't you pick up a pin with a nail? Scientists think that this is the answer: All the molecules in a nail are mixed up together helter-skelter. Each one pulls on others in a helter-skelter way. But in a magnet the molecules are lined up in an orderly way. They can all make their pull in an orderly way. Their combined pull is so strong that they can draw other separate pieces of iron toward them and pick them up.