Europe's Fast Averages.
According to a German authority, the average speed of the fastest trains in Europe is as follows: French, fifty-eight miles an hour; English, fifty-five miles an hour, and German, fifty-one. As a matter of experience, fast trains are hard to find in Germany, and the service in this respect does not compare with France.
It takes the fastest train 227 minutes to go from Berlin to Hamburg, 178 miles, which is 47½ miles an hour, and the "luxe" train, the one fast goer between Münich and Vienna, runs at only 45.60 miles an hour; but there are as a rule frequent trains throughout Germany and the service is good.
For all the rest of Europe the speed drops to about 30 miles an hour for express trains. Italy is surprisingly slow. It takes the express 965 minutes to go from Turin to Rome, 413 miles, or only 26 miles an hour, though the Milan-Rome express makes nearly 40 miles an hour.
Between Rome and Naples, 155 miles, there are only four or five trains daily, the fastest at 34 miles an hour, while it takes 920 minutes to go 439 miles on the best train from Rome to Brindisi, a rate of less than 30 miles an hour.
The express between Stockholm and Gothenburg, the two large cities of Sweden, barely makes 30 miles an hour. In the remaining continental countries the trains are even slower.
THE BEGINNINGS OF THINGS.
Sealing-wax in the present form was first noted in London in the middle of the sixteenth century. A sort of earth was used by the ancient Egyptians in sealing papers and documents. The Egyptians placed such earth on the horns of cattle, and upon it was stamped the seal of the priest. Thus were identified the cattle to be used in the sacrifices.
The diving-bell was not mentioned before the sixteenth century. Two Greeks in that century (1538) gave an exhibition before Charles V, descending into water of considerable depth in a large inverted kettle. They took down with them burning lights. The men returned to the surface without being wet. The light was still burning.
The Lombardians were the first to use effectual quarantine methods against the plague and infectious diseases, and mention of a quarantine is made in Lombardy and Milan in 1374, 1383, and 1399. Prior to that time Christian communities resigned themselves to the visitation of the plague, regarding it as a divine punishment.
J.H. Schultze, a German, obtained the first actual photographic copies (of writing) in 1727; and to Thomas Wedgwood is due the honor of first producing pictures on sensitized surfaces in 1802. Between 1826 and 1833 Louis Jacques Daguerre and Nicéphore Nièpce perfected the daguerreotype process, the first practical photography. Their discovery was communicated to the French Academy of Sciences in 1839.
The turkey is an American bird. Lucullus and the Epicureans did not know about him. He was found in his wild state after Columbus's time. About a hundred years after the discovery of America broiled young turkeys became great delicacies on the Frenchman's table.
A telegraphic line, consisting of twenty-four wires, each representing a letter, was established by Lesage, at Geneva, in 1774; and in the same year Bishop Watson made experiments over a two-mile wire near London. In Germany the invention is credited to Sommering—1809.
Cork was known to the Greeks and Romans, and was put to almost as many uses as at present, although there is no mention in Rome of linoleum, notwithstanding its Roman sound. Glass bottles, with cork stoppers, for wine and beer did not come into use until the middle of the fourteenth century.
Water-mills were used in the time of Julius Cæsar. In Roman times slaves were condemned to the corn-mills, which were propelled by treads. Afterward cattle were used. In the third and fourth centuries there were as many as three hundred cattle-mills in Rome.
Corn-mills are often mentioned in the Bible. The original corn-mill much resembled the modern druggist's pestle. Moses forbade corn-mills to be taken in pawn, for that, he thought, was like taking a man's life in pledge.
Joseph Henry was the first to construct electro-magnets in a useful form. In 1832, at the Albany Academy, he succeeded in ringing a bell over a mile of wire.
Wire was first beaten out by a hammer, but the artisans of Nuremberg, in 1350, began to draw it, which was the great step forward in that art.
The first camera-obscura was invented by Giambattista della Porta, an Italian philosopher, during the latter half of the sixteenth century.
The first cologne was called Hungary water, from the country of its invention. It was made from spirits of wine distilled upon rosemary.
Colored glass came from Egypt. The Egyptians carried the art to great perfection apparently before history begins to tell of it.
Buckwheat began to be cultivated in England in 1597. It had been brought into Europe from Asia one hundred years before.
Wall paper, with fancy colored figures, began to be used in 1620. The art was developed thereafter largely by the French.
A RESCUED POEM.
The Scrap Book Resurrects from Distressing Obscurity a Gem
That Might Otherwise Have Been Lost to Posterity.
History records that in 1895 Langdon Smith, at that time connected with the Sunday edition of the New York Herald, wrote the first few stanzas of the following poem. They were printed in the Herald. Four years later, having joined the staff of the New York Journal in the interim, Mr. Smith came across the verses among his papers, and, reading them over, was struck with a sense of their incompleteness. He added a stanza or two, and laid the poem aside. Later he wrote more stanzas, and finally completed it and sent it in to Arthur Brisbane, editor of the Evening Journal. Mr. Brisbane, being unable to use it, turned it over to Charles E. Russell, of the Morning Journal. It appeared in the Morning Journal—in the middle of a page of want "ads"! How it came to be buried thus some compositor may know. Perhaps a "make-up" man was inspired with a glimmer of editorial intelligence to "lighten up" the page.
But even a deep border of "ads" could not smother the poem. Mr. Smith received letters of congratulation from all parts of the world, along with requests for copies. The poem has been in constant demand; and it has been almost unobtainable. Here for the first time it is given to the public in a suitable position, with proper recognition—proof once more that the true spark cannot long remain hid under a bushel.
Mr. Smith has caught a note of deep interest. He has linked evolution to the theory of soul-transmigration—has translated Wordsworth's ode on immortality into the terms of science. "The glory and the dream" come, not from another world, but from the Paleozoic period, in which existed the most ancient forms of life of which traces still remain. And the author gives us glimpses of man in several geological periods, showing him, finally, as the cave man of the Stone Age; whence it is comparatively a short jump to the twentieth century—and Delmonico's.