From the example of such a company streams of good would radiate in every direction, with countless ramifications. Not only would it accomplish the long desired “elevation of the stage” to such a plane that even the pulpit need not be ashamed to work with it in elicitation of the human snore, but it would spread the light over other arts and industries, causing “the dawn of a new era” generally. Even with the comparatively slow progress we are making now, it is not unreasonable to hope that eventually Man will cease his fussy activity altogether and do nothing whatever, each individual of the species becoming a veritable monument of philosophical inaction, rapt in the contemplation of his own abstract worth and perhaps taking root where he stands to survey it.
PECTOLITE
THIS is one of the younger group of minerals: it was discovered by a German scientist in 1828. For its age it is an exceptionally interesting stone—if it is a stone. Its most eminent and distinguishing peculiarity is described as the “property of parting with minute splinters from its surface upon being handled, these splinters or spicules piercing the hand, producing a pain similar to that experienced by contact with a nettle.”
In the mineral kingdom pectolite ought to take high rank, near the very throne. In its power of annoying man it is a formidable competitor to several illustrious members of the vegetable kingdom, such as the nettle, the cactus, the poison ivy and the domestic briar. There are, indeed, several members of the animal kingdom which hardly excel it in the power of producing human misery. Considering its remarkable aptitude in that bad way its rarity is somewhat difficult to understand, and is perhaps more apparent than real. Professor Hanks says that previously to its discovery in California it had been found in only eight places. If upon investigation these should turn out to be Europe, Asia, Africa, North and South America, Australia and the two Polar continents, the unnatural discrepancy between its objectionable character and its narrow distribution would be explained away, and pectolite seen to be “in touch” with its sister malevolences, whose abundance is usually in the direct ratio of their noxiousness to man.
In his efforts to make this uncommon mineral known, advance its interests and bring it into closer relations with mankind, Professor Hanks is winning golden opinions from the manufacturer of arsenic, the promoter of the Canadian thistle, and the local agent of the imported rattlesnake. The various uses to which it can be put are obvious and numberless. As a missile in a riot—the impeller wearing a glove, but the other person having nothing to guard his face and eyes—its field of usefulness will be wide and fertile. Small fragments of it attractively displayed here and there about the city will give a rich return of agony when thoughtlessly picked up. For village sidewalks inimical to the thin shoe of the period it would be entirely superior to the knotty plank studded with projecting nail heads. With a view to these various “uses of adversity,” it would be well for Professor Hanks to submit careful estimates of the cost of quarrying it and transporting it to places where it can be made to do the greatest harm to the greatest number. To assist and further the purposes of Nature, as manifested in the character of the several agencies and materials which she employs, is the greatest glory of science. A human being assailed by all the natural forces, seizing a stone to defend himself and getting a fistful of pectolitic spiculæ, is a spectacle in which one can get as near and clear a glimpse of the Great Mystery as in any; and science is now prepared to supply the stone.
LA BOULANGÈRE
A ONCE famous American actress, Miss Mary Anderson—sometimes, I think, called “Our Mary”—was an accomplished baker. Among her personal friends, those at least who had the happiness to dine at her home, she had a distinguished reputation as a bread-maker. She was once persuaded to make public the prescription that she used, through the London Times, thus materially enlarging her practice by addition of many new patients. I regret my inability to reproduce the prescription here for the benefit of such house-keepers as are unfettered by Colonial tradition—who, not having inherited the New World system from their great-grandmothers, might be accessible to the light of a later dispensation. For bread-making is, I think, a progressive science in which perfection is not attained at a bound by merely “dissolving the political bands” which connect one country with another.
History is garrulous of our Revolutionary sires: their virtues and other vices are abundantly extolled; but concerning our Revolutionary dames the trumpet of fame remains mysteriously and significantly reticent—a phenomenon not easily accounted for on any hypothesis which assumes or concedes their worth. Historians, poets and those, generally, who have possession of the public ear and hold it from generation to generation, seem to feel that the less said about these merry old girls the better. I believe the secret of it lies in the consciousness of the literary class that the mothers of the Republic made treasonably bad bread, and that their sins of that sort are being visited upon their children, even to these third and fourth generations, and (which is worse) practiced by them. No doubt the success of the Revolutionary War would have been achieved later if our brave grandfathers had not been fortified in body and spirit by privation of the domestic loaf of the period, known to us through the domestic loaf of our own. To immunity from the latter desolating agency the soldiers on both sides in the more recent and greater conflict were obviously indebted for the development of that martial spirit which made them so reluctant to stop fighting and go home. It must be said, however, in defence of the Bread of Our Union that if one is going to eat the salt-spangled butter which also appertains to the home of the brave it really does not greatly matter what one eats it on.