Some red-headed woodpeckers in South Dakota, preferring their meat fresh, evolved a way to keep it so which compares favorably with the “cold storage” of man. One bird stored nearly one hundred grasshoppers in a long crack in a post. All were living when discovered, but so tightly wedged that they could not escape, and during the long winter of that region it is to be presumed the prudent bird had his provision. The observer found other places of storage full of grasshoppers, and discovered that the red-heads lived upon them nearly all winter.—Olive Thorne Miller, “The Bird Our Brother.”
(1128)
Foresight, Lack of—See [Prediction, False].
FORGERY, LITERARY
At the end of the eighteenth century the literary forgers were especially active. The Ossianic poems, the work of a Highland schoolmaster, James McPherson, who pretended to have translated them from the Gaelic, raised a controversy that stirred up much ill-feeling among the rulers of the literary world of England. Then Chatterton, “the sleepless soul that perished in its pride,” as Wordsworth sings, with his remarkable forgeries, deceived many of the antiquarians, among them Horace Walpole, and even Dr. Johnson “wondered how the young whelp could have done it.” Another young forger was Ireland, a most remarkable impostor, who, at the age of 18, not only forged papers and legal documents purporting to be under Shakespeare’s own hand and seal, and so deceived some of the most learned Shakespearian scholars, but also produced a play “Vortigern,” which he claimed was by that great bard, and which was actually performed at Sheridan’s theater. Whether or not Payne Collier tried his hand at correcting Shakespeare is still a matter of question; if guilty, his so-called “corrections” of the poet’s text appear but slight deceptions compared to the forgery of a whole play, altho these notes proved far more deceptive than the spurious drama. Mention must be made of George Paslmanazar, who called himself a native of Formosa, invented a Formosan language, and wrote a history of the island; of the forgeries of ballads by Surtees, who deceived Sir Walter Scott himself, and of the forged letters of Shelley, to which Browning, who supposed them genuine, wrote an introduction. Instances of this kind of forgery have been so frequent of late years that editors and publishers are at last beginning to realize that there is often less in a name than they suppose.—Boston Globe.
(1129)
FORGETFULNESS IN PREACHERS
Sudden forgetfulness is not an unusual thing in the pulpit. Aubrey, the antiquary, says that when he was a freshman at college he heard Dr. Sanderson, bishop of Lincoln, well known for his work, “Nine Cases of Conscience,” break down in the middle of the Lord’s Prayer. Even the great French preacher Massillon once stopt in the middle of a sermon from a defect of memory, and Massillon himself recorded that the same thing happened through an excess of apprehension to two other preachers whom he went to hear in different parts of the same day. Another French preacher stopt in the middle of his sermon and was unable to proceed. The pause was, however, got over ingeniously. “Friends,” said he, “I had forgot that a person much afflicted is recommended to your immediate prayers.” He meant himself. He fell on his knees, and before he rose he had recovered the thread of his discourse, which he concluded without his want of memory being perceived. Chambers’s Journal.
(1130)
FORGETTING AND REMEMBERING