The Aborigines of Australia have a rich and balanced diet. They not only eat meat, fruit, vegetables and even a type of bread but sometimes they supplement their calorie intake by eating giant ants and the big, fat grubs they find under the bark of trees. It is a rather startling sight to see the Aborigines eating these creatures, which they consider delicacies, while they are still alive and squirming.

The search for food is the duty of every member of the Aborigine tribe although the tasks of the men differ from those of the women. The men do most of the hunting, mainly for kangaroos, emus and large lizards. Their weapons are spears and boomerangs, but to catch the emu they pound up pituri leaves with water as a bait, so that the bird becomes stupefied and is easily speared.

Sometimes the men are away from the encampment for several days on hunting trips. During these periods the women are responsible for feeding the tribe with whatever animal or vegetable food they can find.

In the countries where bamboo grows this wood is used in an incredible number of ways as it is cheap and plentiful. Bamboo stems are used to build bridges, houses, boats, irrigation pipes and receptacles of all kinds. One of the best known uses of bamboo in its flexible state is in fishing rods. This wood is also used to make garden furniture because it is light and strong and stands up to the weather. The shoots of the bamboo are also delicious to eat.

Bamboo belongs to the graminaceous family of plants, which means it is a sort of grass. It has a rhizome, or root part, which grows from year to year and produces new stalks. Sometimes these stalks are enormous, growing to more than 30 meters high.

The stalks are hollow and jointed, with knots from which branches grow. These branches become covered in leaves and the bamboo resembles a tree. Most bamboos flower very rarely and are thorn less, but a few kinds have sharp spines.

The first experiments in the industrial use of methane gas began about seventy years ago. Further developments took place during the Second World War when natural gas, which is composed largely of methane, was used as a substitute for petrol which was scarce.

The use of methane as a fuel for the internal combustion engine was studied first in France and later in Italy. Today methane is used fairly extensively as a fuel, especially for domestic gas cookers and central heating boilers. The fact that methane can be transported in cylinders, tanks and along pipelines has made it possible to take it to country areas where manufactured gas would be difficult and expensive to obtain.

Methanol and formaldehyde are obtained from methane. Methanol is used as an anti-freeze and formaldehyde as a disinfectant.

There are various ways of locating deposits of methane gas. The most ingenious method is to cause miniature earthquakes through underground explosions. As the sure how long it takes the shock waves to reach the rock layers and travel back again. When these shock waves encounter a zone of liquid and gas deposits, the way they travel changes and special instruments register the change. Once the deposits have been found, the gas is extracted and distributed through pipelines or liquefied and sealed inside metal cylinders.

The geological conditions for oil and natural gas are similar. Exploration for oil in many countries led to the discovery and utilization of vast quantities of gas.

As far back as 1665 a British scientist predicted that artificial fibers would one day by produced. The first experiments were carried out about 200 years later by a Swiss scientist in Lausanne and the first industrial production of the fiber took place in 1884 under the Frenchman Chardonnet.

Naturally it took some time for the fibers to become popular. In the first decades of the twentieth century rayon was being produced from cellulose. Protein fibers, made from such natural materials as casein, in skimmed milk, peanuts and soya beans, were also produced.

Today, the production of synthetic resins has made artificial fibers into a vast industry. Its products include nylon, dralon, orlon and Dacron which are used all over the world.

The body of the ant-eater is covered in long hair that prevents ants from reaching its skin. For this reason it has no cause to fear insect bites when it tears the homes of ants apart with its strong claws.

The ant-eater makes its meal by shooting out its long, sticky, worm-like tongue and scooping up the ants that swarm all over the ground after their home has been destroyed. It has highly developed salivary glands which secrete the sticky substance that coats its tongue and traps the insects.

The Arbutus unedo, or strawberry tree, became the emblem of the Carbonari, the band of patriots who fought for the independence of Italy during the 1800s. They chose this plant because it bore the colors of Italy: green leaves, white flowers and red berries.

The berries, which are pleasant to eat, ripen from September to December. The leaves of the Arbutus are usually dark-green but they turn a lighter shade in the autumn. The flowers appear after December.

Wind carries objects along as it blows over the surface of the ground, and the flatter and more arid the land underneath, the more effective the wind’s action becomes. In the deserts, for example, the wind shifts enormous quantities of sand, raising it, grain by grain, and carrying it over great distances to form dunes. During desert storms some large dunes of sand can be moved by more than 10 meters.

In some cases sands from the Sahara desert have been carried by the wind to as far as northern Europe. In China there are large regions of soil which consists of fine particles that have been blown there by the wind.

Sand dunes are also found on sandy coasts with onshore winds and near rivers with sandy beds which are exposed during the dry season. Evidence of their existence is found in many geological periods.

As well as carrying sand along, the wind also breaks down and destroys. When sand and dust are driven along in a strong wind against rocks, they act like sand paper and wear away, little by little, the hard rocky areas that they strike. The destructive force of wind-blown sand is greater when the rocks it strikes against are soft or crumbly.

Often wind-blown sand carves strange shapes in rocks, resembling abstract sculptures that stand up in isolated groups in the vastness of desert areas. One of the most common shapes of this mushroom. This shape results from the fact that the sand particles that do all the rubbing are always in the lower levels of the air current and thus affect the lower parts of the rock.

If we take some water from a river in full flow or from a pond after a while certain particles will fall to the bottom of the glass or receptacle. These particles previously floated in the water giving it a brown muddy color.

We can imagine what this process would be like magnified many millions of times and occurring for long periods. This is how clay deposits gather.

Rocks and pebbles require quite strong force to move them along, but the fine particles of clay are so light that they float in the water and are borne along for great distances in rivers to the sea. When these clay particles finally come to rest they form what is known as argillaceous or clay rocks. These rocks are very fine grained and smooth and many become soft if soaked in water.

Clays are basically made up of silica, aluminum and water in various amounts together with other elements such as iron, calcium, chalk and mica. No other earth material has so many uses or such a wide importance. One of the purest forms of clay is kaolin which is used in making porcelain and china. Impure clays have been used for bricks, tiles and the crude types of pottery since the earliest times.

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The first electrical battery was born as a result of one of the most famous scientific disputes. During the eighteenth century, the Italian doctor Luigi Galvani of Bologna carried out a series of experiments on dead frogs. Galvani obtained vibrations in the muscles of the animals hung from copper hooks over an iron rod. From these twitchings Galvani deduced that the frog possessed electric properties, although he was mistaken in thinking this.

But his work was valuable even though it produced faulty conclusions because it opened the way to the study of electricity by such scientists as Alessandro Volta, another Italian. Volta turned Galvani's theory on its head by saying that the frog had 'conducted' electricity which had been generated in the contact between the two metals.

After many fierce arguments Volta won the day. Using his own theories, he went on to invent the electric battery by placing zinc and copper in a bath of acid water and so provided a source of continuous current.

Modern physics has revealed the real nature of electricity, a mysterious force which has been known to man since the earliest times. All substances in which the atoms have been placed out of balance because they lack certain electrons or because they have too many of them are called either positively charged or negatively charged. Positive charges are composed of atoms or molecules which have lost one or more electrons and negative chargers consist of atoms which for some reason have more than their normal number of electrons.

Electrons which pass from one atom to another inside a material such as a copper wire, form an electric current. This current flows extremely fast from one end of the wire to the other.=

When the current flows in the same direction, it is called direct current or D.C. This is the type of current generated by a battery as opposed to an alternating current, A.C., which changes its flow to a well defined frequency.