are to be found in “Fame,” translated from Schiller, one of the Hymns of the Ages.
Platform
In Carlyle’s “Letters of Oliver Cromwell,” vol. iii, p. 89, is a passage in which Cromwell uses the word platform in the modern American sense of a creed, or theory, or declaration of principles. He charges Governor Dundas (Edinburgh Castle) and the Presbyterian ministers with “darkening and not beholding the glory of God’s wonderful dispensations in this series of His providences in England, Scotland, and Ireland, both now and formerly, through envy at instruments, and because the things did not work forth your platform, and the great God did not come down to your minds and thoughts.”
FORECASTS
Sic Vos Non Vobis
The iconoclasts are turning their attention to the claims of Harvey and Jenner. They declare that the claim of Andrea Cesalpino, of Avezzo, one of the famous scientists of Italy in the sixteenth century, to the prior discovery of the circulation of the blood, has been established. And as to Jenner, they bring forward this inscription in the graveyard of Worth Maltravers, Dorsetshire, to show that he was anticipated by several years:
“Sacred to the memory of Benjamin Jesty, of Downshay, died April 16, 1816, aged 79. He was born at Yetminster, in this county, and was an upright, honest man, particularly noted for having been the first person known that introduced the cow-pox by inoculation, and who, for his great strength of mind, made the experiment from the cow on his wife and two sons in the year 1774.”
The “strength of mind” referred to would be laughable were it not for the fact that Jesty had already caught the cow-pox from his cows, and so did not need to be inoculated for it.
The Moons of Mars
The following passage, from Voltaire’s “Micromegas Histoire Philosophique,” is curious in view of the discovery of the two moons of Mars, several years ago, by Professor Asaph Hall, of the National Observatory, Washington. The work describes a journey, throughout the solar system, of Micromegas, a philosopher of Sirius, and a being of enormous proportions, who is accompanied by an inhabitant of Saturn, the latter intermediate in size between the great Sirian and the inhabitants of our earth. The extract is from the third chapter: