If all the efforts wasted on such tasks as that described below were put into useful and constructive work, the world’s wealth would be far more rapidly increased.
Mr. William L. Stuart, a young man engaged in business in New York City, has performed the seemingly impossible feat of engraving the entire Lord’s Prayer on the head of an ordinary pin, to which he has added his name and the year, making altogether two hundred and seventy-six letters and figures.
Mr. Stuart did the work at odd times during his regular employment and with very ordinary tools, which seemingly are not adapted to such fine engraving. The pin was set in a block of wood, and a common engraver’s tool was used. A simple microscope, costing only about twenty-five cents, and known as a “linen tester,” furnished the necessary magnifying.
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USELESS STRUCTURES
Science speaks of useless physiological structures, as when we read in “The Descent of Man”:
Man, as well as every other animal, presents structures which, as far as we can judge with our little knowledge, are not now of any service to him, nor have been so during any former period of his existence, either in relation to his general condition of life, or of one sex to the other. Such structures can not be accounted for by any form of selection, or by the inherited effects of the use and disuse of parts.
Useless structures are not discerned alone by science. History and experience, in the large field of life, have seen them many times. The efforts of man have often reclaimed “useless structures.”
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USURY IN OLD DAYS