OUR SCRAP ALBUM.

Lake County Press, Issue 498, 14 April 1892, Page 2

OUR SCRAP ALBUM.

THE “ COMPOUND” DOES IT. Dr Abbot says that if Adam had/: saved £2O a day for 6,000 years, ancb had found no bank to give him interest,, he would have saved less than OorueliusYandertilt is worth to-day. MINUTE MODEL. In Waterbury (Conn.) an engine,, which stands on a space of 7 16tha of.' an inch square and' reaches a height of. |of an inch, has been made. It has 148 parts, held together by tifry-two-screws. The diameter of the cylinder is l-26th of an inch, and the wholeweighs 3gr. COMPOSITION OF THE SUN. Thousands of curious and ingenious theories have been brought forth to account for the fact that the sun, although he has winded his burning disc across the heavens for untold ages, continues to burn without being consumed or his bulk being lessened in the least.. Some leaned men affect to behavethat the great orb is a monstrous ball of gas, but even a great ball of gas. would be consumed in its utmost atom in a few thousand years. Others pretend to believe that its fires are kept up by the remains of wrecked worlds, which are constantly falling into- itsdepth, but even this seems far from probable, not to say a purely absurd conclusion- In giving his opinion on. the last contention, one of the most eminent astromoners of the day has figured that a mountain range consisting of 176 cubic miles falling into the sun, would only be sufficient to maintain the present heat for a single second; a mass equal to that of our earth would engender only enough of heat to last 93 years. If these conclusions are correct, and wo have no means of proving them false, well may we ask the question : Of what wonderful, indestructible substance is the sun, composed 1 j WISE IN THEIR GENERATION.

After all, the newest authors are the oldest. In this new edition (Familiar Quotations) we have a lot of familiar sayings traced away back to Greece and Egypt. A new author by the name ol Pilpay figures in this edition. He was a Brahmin, and he lived several centuries before Christ. Writing in some early dialect of- Sar.sc it* he° deliberately and with the most horrible heathen depravity, stole some of the best sayings of Herrick, Shakespeare, Butler, Cibber, and was bold enough to appropriate such modern sayings as “ What is bred in the bone will never come out of theflesh,” “Possession is the strongest tenure of the law,” and soon. Hesiod* who wrote in the seventh century before Christ, was another of these antique plagiarists. Theognis, iEichylus,

Sophocles, Europides, Plautus, Terence, and many others were great suppliers of modern familiar quotations. Every time you say “ Hence these tears,” “ the flower of youlli,” “ I do not care one straw,” “with presence of mind,” or any one of several other things equally familiar, you are simply quoting Terence, who died 159 years before Christ. All the way through he is as modern as Mr Howells. Here is one of his sayings, and after it is quoted nothing more need be said :—“ in fine, nothing is said now that has not been said before.”—Poston Transcript.