Entries from September 2006 ↓

How far the very custom of hearing any thing spouted, withers and blows upon a fine passage, may be seen in those speeches from Henry the Fifth, &c. which are current in the mouths of school-boys from their being to be found in Enfield Speakers, and such kind of books. I confess myself utterly unable to appreciate that celebrated soliloquy in Hamlet, beginning “To be or not to be,” or to tell whether it be good, bad, or indifferent, it has been so handled and pawed about by declamatory boys and men, and torn so inhumanly from its living place and principle of continuity in the play, till it is become to me a perfect dead member.

(From “On the Tragedies of Shakspeare, Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage Representation” (1811, text of 1818), in The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 1, Miscellaneous Prose.)

A new lead for deep sea sounding carries a cartridge which explodes on touching the bottom. A submerged microphone receives the sound and the depth is estimated from the time occupied by the lead in sinking to the bottom.

When leeches were kept in every chemist’s shop and often in private houses their behavior was subject to constant observation, and it was generally noticed that in still weather, dry or wet, they remained at the bottom, but rose, often as much as twenty-four hours in advance, before a change, and in case of a thunderstorm rose very quickly to the surface, descending when it was past.

Spiders are met with in the forests of Java whose webs are so strong that it requires a knife to cut through them. A spider weighing four pounds, which has taken up his residence in a cathedral at Munich, regales herself with a large supply of lamp oil. A Texas spider weaves a balloon four feet long and two feet wide, which she fastens to a tree by a single thread, then marches on board with her half dozen little ones, cuts the thread and away goes the airship to some far distant point on the prairie.

We have it on the authority of the Brooklyn Eagle that smoke never does issue from a volcano. Nor does fire. The red light seen above the crater is no flame. It is the glow of molten lava reflected on the under side of the clouts of dust and the clouds of dust are never mixed with smoke. There are bursts of steam sometimes, but rocks do no burn as wood does, and give off the finely-divided carbon dust that we know as smoke. The pictures of eruptions in the geographies of our youth are wrong, and so are reports from Prescott, Ariz., that smoke is issuing from one of the peaks of the Harque Hala range, thus indicating “that an active volcano is developing.”

A very curious phenomenon has been much commented upon in the German press, says the Philadelphia Record. Prof. K. G. Fiedler, who has been investigating the appearance of so-called fulgurites for many years, has recently received two specimens, which are the largest he has ever seen. Their origin is due to lightning striking a bank of sand. This actin of lightning is explained in the following way: The heat of the electric discharge melts the quartz to a fluid mass, which becomes solid after cooling off. The shape is very odd, branching and forking out, tapering toward the ends. These fulgurites are hollow their entire length, the forked ends pointing downward where found. They are from seven to nine feet long, and their ends reached into very wet sand, where all traces of lightning ceased.

[tags]Ann Arbor Register, October, 1895[/tags]

“Bicycling is not nearly so much of a craze in England as here; and the reason therefore, as I figured it out after much interested investigation, is illustrative of a notable difference between the United States and England in athletic and sporting matters, said a wheelman just returned from a transatlantic trip to a New York Sun reporter. “Because of the superb roads to be found in every part of England I expected to find the country simply overrun with bicyclists. But I didn’t. Of course there are bicyclists to be met all over the land, but I soon learned that the sport had by no means the general hold on the people disposed to exercise or athletics that it has here. It has taken a comparatively greater hold upon the women than the men which is entirely consistent with my theory. Here in the United States the growth of bicycling has meant very largely the growth of the habit of taking exercise. We do not go into sports actively, as the English do. We, as a people, don’t play baseball, football, or any other athletic game. We are mightily interested in sports, but mostly in seeing professionals at play in them. Of the twenty thousand people who go to see the three or four big football games in a year, how many play football? How many of the ten thousand or more cranks who watch the paid baseball nines ever play the game themselves? Now in England there are actually dozens of football and cricket clubs in every town, and every village and hamlet has its team. They play cricket all summer and football all winter. Every fine evening and every Saturday afternoon every bit of turf near a town or village is covered with players of some game or another. Sport is a profession here; a pastime there. Here the mass of the people are interested as spectators; there as participants. Bicycling is there only an alternative means of exercise and amusement; here it is practically the one form of athletics that the whole people have taken to. It’s a might good thing that something has turned up at last to turn the attention of the nation to healthful exercise and athletics. The bicycle fad will wane after a while, for it isn’t an ideal sport, although in many ways an attractive one. But other popular outdoor sport will follow in its wake, and I imagine the bicycle craze will figure as the beginning of an important era in American history.”

[tags]Ann Arbor Register, September, 1895[/tags]

Elephants are completely disabled by one blow from the Arab’s two handed sword, which almost severs the hind leg, biting deep into the bone. This feat is varied by slashing off the trunk, leaving it dangling only by a piece of skin. A Ghoorka was seen by the late Laurence Oliphant to behead a buffalo with a single blow of his kookerie. And Sir Samuel Baker, a man powerful enough to wield during his African exploration the “Baby,” an elephant rifle weighing twenty-two pounds, once clove a wild boar in with his hunting knife almost in halves as it was making a final rush, catching it just behind the shoulder, where the hide and bristles were at least a span thick.

Sir Walter Scott relates how the Earl of Angus, with his huge sweeping brand, challenged an opponent to fight, and at a blow chopped asunder his thigh bone, killing him on the spot. There is a story current in Australia that Lieutenant Anderson, in 1852, during an encounter with bushrangers, cut clean the gun barrel of his adversary with his sword. And at Kassassin it is related that one of Arabi Pasha’s soldiers was severed in two during the midnight charge. But, in the opinion of experts, this is very improbable, even had the new regulation sabre then been in use.–London Globe.

[tags]Ann Arbor Register, August, 1895[/tags]

Georgie, by Jacob Abbott, 1857. Part of the Rollo Story Books, this short story was bound separately from Rollo in the Woods but seems to continue the pagination (if not the story…)

Thanks to Joseph Hauser for post-processing this book.

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Rollo in the Woods, by Jacob Abbott. 1857.

Thanks to Joseph R. Hauser for post-processing this book.

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The Fruit of the Tree, by Edith Wharton. 1907.

Thanks to Melissa Er-Raqabi for post-processing this book.

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Primavera: Poems by Four Authors, by Stephen Phillips, Laurence Binyon, Manmohan Ghose and Arthur Shearly Cripps. 1900.

Thanks to Sankar Viswanathan for post-processing this book.

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