There is, however, in reality, be it distinctly understood, no power absolutely gained; but the man’s force is concentrated, as for instance in compressing the bale of cotton, to an extent which, if the ordinary mechanical powers of the lever or screw were employed, would require the aid of ponderous machinery.
Mr Bramah was therefore greatly mistaken when he published it as the discovery of a new mechanical power: but he invented a beautiful and most effective means of simply accumulating a prodigious force by the very simple means of the hydrostatic pressure of fluids.
Hydraulic or Bramah presses are applied in New York and other American ports for the purpose of raising large vessels on strong wooden platforms out of the water, for effecting repairs, &c. They are also employed in removing houses—some of them brick, and three stories high—from one part of a street to another. In this case strong wooden beams, like the ways used in ship-launching, are placed under the house, and in the direction of the intended site, and hydraulic presses are then employed for pushing the house along, with prodigious force, and so gradually and gently as not even to crack the plaster of a room ceiling. By the same means the roof of a large cotton factory near Aberdeen was raised entire, and an additional story added to the building, without displacing a single slate! In this instance the roof was lifted gradually about four inches at a time, progressing from end to end of the building, the height of the walls being increased by a single row of bricks at a time.
Such are a few of the results of a single principle, a rule to which there is no exception, which holds equally good in the organic as in the inorganic world. Even the blood-vessels of the body are subject to this law—the sides of all vessels below the level of the heart enduring an additional outward pressure of half an ounce for every inch in height, which at the toes would amount to somewhere about two pounds. When a person stands erect in a bath, the pressure on all parts of the body is not equal; it is greater upon the legs than upon the trunk; the former are pressed upward, and hence in part the difficulty experienced in standing upon the bottom in deep water.
T. A.
Disagreeable People.—Some persons are of so teazing and fidgetty a turn of mind, that they do not give you a moment’s rest. Everything goes wrong with them. They complain of a headache or the weather. They take up a book, and lay it down again—venture an opinion, and retract it before they have half done—offer to serve you, and prevent some one else from doing it. If you dine with them at a tavern, in order to be more at your ease, the fish is too little done—the sauce is not the right one; they ask for a sort of wine which they think is not to be had, or if it is, after some trouble, procured, do not touch it; they give the waiter fifty contradictory orders, and are restless and sit on thorns the whole of dinner time. All this is owing to a want of robust health, and of a strong spirit of enjoyment; it is a fastidious habit of mind, produced by a valetudinary habit of body: they are out of sorts with everything, and of course their ill-humour and captiousness communicates itself to you, who are as little delighted with them as they are with other things. Another sort of people, equally objectionable with this helpless class, who are disconcerted by a shower of heaven’s rain, or stopped by an insect’s wing, are those who, in the opposite spirit, will have every thing their own way, and carry all before them—who cannot brook the slightest shadow of opposition—who are always in the heat of an argument, unless where they disdain your understanding so much as not to condescend to argue with you—who knit their brows and roll their eyes and clench their teeth in some speculative discussion, as if they were engaged in a personal quarrel—and who, though successful over almost every competitor, seem still to resent the very offer of resistance to their supposed authority, and are as angry as if they had sustained some premeditated injury. There is an impatience of temper and an intolerance of opinion in this that conciliates neither our affection nor esteem. To such persons nothing appears of any moment but the indulgence of a domineering intellectual superiority, to the disregard and discomfiture of their own and everybody else’s comfort. Mounted on an abstract proposition, they trample on every courtesy and decency of behaviour; and though, perhaps, they do not intend the gross personalities they are guilty of, yet they cannot be acquitted of a want of due consideration for others, and of an intolerable egotism in the support of truth and justice. You may hear one of these impetuous declaimers pleading the cause of humanity in a voice of thunder, or expatiating on the beauty of a Guido, with features distorted with rage and scorn. This is not a very amiable or edifying spectacle.—Hazlitt’s Table-Talk.
Necessity of a Thorough Education.—Good education being a preparation for social life, necessarily embraces the whole man—body, head, and heart—for in social life the whole man is necessarily called into exertion in one way or another almost every hour. But this is not sufficient. There must be no preponderance, as well as no exclusion; a limited or biassed education produces monsters. Some are satisfied with the cultivation of a single faculty—some with the partial cultivation of each. A child is trained up to working; he is hammered into a hardy laborer—a stout material for the physical bone and muscle of the state. This is good, so far as it goes; but it is bad, because it goes no farther. He is not taught reading; he is not taught religion; above all, he is not taught thinking. He never looks into his other self; he soon forgets its existence; the man becomes all body; his intellectual and moral being lies fallow. The growth of such a system will be a sturdy race of machines—delvers and soldiers, but not men: so much brute physical energy swinging loosely through society at the discretion of those more spiritual natures to whom their education, neglected or perverted in another way, gives wickedness with power, and teaches the secrets of mind only as instruments to crush or bend men for their own selfish purposes. Others educate the intellectual and moral being only; the physical, once the building is raised, like an idle scaffolding, is cast by. But the omission is injurious—often fatal: malady is laid up, in all its thousand forms, in the infant and the child. It spreads out upon the man. When his spirit is in the flush of its strength, and his moral rivals his intellectual nature in compass and power, then it is that the despised portion of his being rises up and avenges itself for this contempt. The studious man feels, as he walks down life, a thousand minute retaliations for the prodigal waste of his youthful vigour. The body bows down beneath the burden of the mind; it wears gradually away into weakness and incompetency; clouds of sickness, pangs of pain, obscure, distort, weigh it to the earth. Health is not a thing of organization only, but of training; it is to be laid up bit by bit. We are to be made healthy—tutored and practised into health. Omit health in favour of the intellectual and moral faculties, and you provide instruments, it is true, for mind, but instruments which, when wanted, cannot be used. Intellectual and moral education may rank before physical, but they are not more essential; the physical powers are the hewers of wood and the drawers of water for the spiritual. The base of the column is in the earth; but, without it, neither could the shaft stand firm above it, nor the capital ascend to the sky.—Wyse on Education.
Home.—The great end of prudence is to give cheerfulness to those hours which splendour cannot gild, and acclamation cannot exhilarate. Those soft intervals of unbended amusement, in which a man shrinks to his natural dimensions, and throws aside the ornaments or disguises which he feels in privacy to be useless incumbrances, and to lose all effect when they become familiar. To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution. It is indeed at home that every man must be known by those who would make a just estimate of his virtue or felicity; for smiles and embroidery are alike occasional, and the mind is often dressed for show in painted honour and fictitious benevolence.—Johnson.
If it were enacted that only persons of high rank should dine upon three dishes, the lower sort would desire to have three; but if commoners were permitted to have as many dishes as they pleased, whilst the nobility were limited to two, the inferior sort would not exceed that number. An order to abolish the wearing of jewels has set a whole country in an uproar; but if the order had only prohibited earrings to ladies of the first quality, other women would not have desired to wear them.—The Reflector.
The very consciousness of being beloved by the object of our attachment, will disarm of its terrors even death itself.—D’Israeli.