Among the many mistakes prevalent in regard to the habits of animals and insects is the notion that ants in general gather food in harvest for a winter’s store. This is quite an error; in the first place, they do not live on grain, but chiefly on animal food; and in the next place, they are torpid in winter and do not require food. There is in Poonah a grain-feeding species which stores up millet seed, but certainly our ants have no claim to Jane Taylor’s stanza,—
“Who taught the little ant the way
Its narrow hole to bore,
And labor all the summer day
To gather winter store?”
Caroline Herschel’s many Years
The life of Caroline Herschel, one would imagine, was anything but favorable to long-lasting. Insufficient sleep, irregular and hasty meals, long fasts, excessive toil, both bodily and mental, were the conditions of her life—at least, during the fifteen years she was her brother’s housekeeper and astronomical assistant. A lady who devoted herself to hard work, one of the necessities of which was that she had to spend the whole of every starry night, covered with dew or hoar frost, on a grass-plot in the garden, would not, one would think, be likely to make old bones. At the age of eighty-two, however, according to her nephew’s account, she skipped up two flights of stairs and ran about like a girl of twenty. She died at the age of ninety-eight.
Constitution of the Early Church
Dean Stanley once remarked that the most learned of all the living bishops of England (Dr. Lightfoot) has, with his characteristic moderation and erudition, proved beyond dispute, in a celebrated essay attached to his edition of “St. Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians,” that the early council of the Apostolic churches of the first century was not that of a single bishop, but of a body of pastors indifferently styled bishops or presbyters, and that it was not till the very end of the apostolic age that the office which we now call Episcopacy gradually and surely made its way into the churches of Asia Minor; that Presbytery was not a later growth out of Episcopacy, but that Episcopacy was a later growth out of Presbytery; that the office which the apostles instituted was a kind of rule, not of bishops, but of presbyters; and that even down to the third century presbyters as well as bishops possessed the power of nominating and consecrating bishops.