“What did you study Latin for?” was my illogical but American response. “Why, I am a bachelor of arts?” was his prompt reply, with the air of one who had given a conclusive answer. “Perhaps these boys will be bachelors of arts by and by,” I added cheerfully. “Then, what in the world are they in a manual-training school for?” he exclaimed, with almost a sneer at my evident lack of acquaintance with the etiquette of educational values. I tried to explain my theory of an all-round education—and my practise of “putting the whole boy to school”—but he would not be convinced. He could not see the propriety of mixing utility and tool dexterity with culture—Calvin M. Woodward, Science.
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COMPROMISES IN GRAVITIES
All orbits, including the orbits of comets, are the result of compromises in gravities. Now you have got to get over the idea that because one body attracts another strongly it is likely to draw it smack into it. It doesn’t. I made an apparatus in my laboratory the other day to show my students about that.
I fixt up a little gun capable of shooting a steel ball quite a distance up an inclined plate of glass. The ball shot upward and then rolled directly back into the muzzle of the gun time after time. That was to show what a comet would do if just merely shot out into space to be uninfluenced by any other heavenly bodies after it got a start.
Then I put a powerful electric magnet under the plate of glass, quite a little distance away from the track of my steel ball. This time when it was shot upward instead of keeping on its straight path or swerving directly into the magnet, as some of my students expected it to do, it shot on past, curving its course toward the magnet, and then finally it swung around the magnet in very much the way the comet is swinging around the sun. On its return course it swung off in a new direction altogether. My students were quite delighted with the oval course taken by the steel ball. It was just such a course as they had seen mapped out for Halley’s visitor.—H. Jacoby, New York Times.
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Compulsion in Religion—See [Militant Evangelism].
CONCEIT
There are too many men who make the sentiment of this verse their creed: