All may be mist, unless, defying distance,
His vision, at such moment far too clear,
Cutting all chaff,
May lay you, by his barrel, on your bier,
'Twixt life and death, or, rather, half and half!
Blood-Heat and Freezing-Point.
SOCIETY FOR THE CONFUSION OF USELESS
KNOWLEDGE.
August, 1841.—At the Annual Meeting of the British Fill-us-off-ical and Feeding Association, at Ply-mouth, the following ingenious plan was promulgated—for a Company for the Confusion of Useless Knowledge. It is needless to say that so praiseworthy a project met with the unbounded sympathy and concurrence of all the members present.
It is intended by the Company to supply the present enormous mental appetite of the public with a full feed of science and literature in a series of sixpenny bits, or bites. To prevent the appetite from becoming cloyed by too continuous a fare of any one kind, the bits will be so intermingled and diversified as to keep the biters always expecting and never satisfied. Thus, the biography of Bacon will be relieved by a bit of the history of Greece; a bit of Astronomy, by a bit of Brewing; a bit of Roman History, by a bit of Algebra; a bit of Chemistry, by a bit of Commerce; a bit of the History of the Church, by a bit of Sir Christopher Wren. Vegetable Physiology, bit I., will be probably followed by a Treatise on Probability; from the study of which the reader may, if he please, try to find out when he is likely to see Vegetable Physiology, bit II. The whole will thus form, in the mind of the student, a most desirable complication of the Novum Organon, Athens, Malting and Mash-tubs, the Cæsars, Logarithms, Oxygen, Tariffs, Telescopes, the Arian Controversy, the building of St. Paul's, Cellular Tissues, and Reversionary Interests.