You can buy strawberries in baskets very cheap, partly because the baskets cost very little for labor. The man who tacks them together uses a magnetized tack hammer. This magnetic tack hammer picks up the tacks of its own accord, and the man drives them in the basket as fast as he can touch the magnet to the heads of the tacks and strike the basket.
In the great steel works where armor plate is made powerful magnets are used to carry the hot plates from one place to another. The magnet lifts up the hot, soft metal without denting it or damaging it and drops it down where it is wanted. The power which moves trolley cars through the streets is nothing in reality but an application of the force of the magnetic principle. ----
That the earth itself is a great magnet cannot be questioned.
And there is no doubt that each of us human beings is a compound magnet on his own account, depending for his welfare on magnetic force.
The millions of red corpuscles in the blood, each with its infinitesimal particles of iron, absorb in the lungs and distribute throughout the body the electric forces on which we depend, and with which we do our work.
When you read of men and women dealing in a blundering kind of a way with abstract, abstruse speculations and problems, do not laugh at them too heartily. They are no more ridiculous than the old Greeks who thought that a magnet could be regulated by garlic or goat"s blood. And their wild theories of to-day may settle down into great utility centuries from now. This applies to Christian Science, faith cures, telepathy, and the many other speculations of the present day. There is unquestionably much future fruit and value in many or all of them.
WHO IS INDEPENDENT? n.o.bODY
We all have our moments of imagining ourselves INDEPENDENT characters. We take pride in our independence and are never as foolish as when trying to prove how independent we are.
Every man, to begin with, is born absolutely at the mercy of his ancestry. You have not a thing in you, and you never will have a thing in you, that you did not inherit from some one of the thousands and thousands of ancestors, all of whom are dimly stored away in your complex make-up.
You may develop marvellously the faculties which they gave you.
But you ARE DEPENDENT on those who brought you into the world, and upon those back of them.
The Kaffir, sober, industrious, honest, with all the virtues rolled up within him, has not a fragment of one chance in ten thousand billions of equalling the achievements of a tenth-rate white man whose ancestral start was better. ----
After birth you start with dependence on your ancestors, and after youth you are dependent on your education.
Facts are your tools, and you can"t work without them.
If your mind has the right formation, if your brain is provided with the deep convolutions, and good luck has supplied you with a good education in youth, the whole thing is dependent on your health--on your liver, your stomach, or some other part of your internal machinery.
Very often your success is dependent on your temper and tact.
These depend on your digestion. Digestion, of course, depends on your cook, and the cook"s attention to business may depend on the politeness of the policeman in front of the house.
You may FEEL absolutely independent and THINK you are independent, when as a matter of fact you are miserably dependent on the mood of the policeman who has snubbed the lady who cooks your food.
WHEN WE BEGIN USING LAND UNDER THE OCEANS BIG WORK AHEAD FOR MAN, KIND FRIENDS
There is a great deal of water on this earth of ours and a great deal of land underneath it.
All the treasures of these hidden plains are simply put away for our future use by bountiful nature, as prudent parents put money in the savings bank for their young ones. ----
Already in Chili they are mining coal under the bed of the Pacific Ocean, and the traveler may ride on electric cars through solid tunnels of coal beneath the waters of the greatest ocean.
The tin mines in Wales extend far out beneath the sea.
Workers in the Calumet and Hecla mines work beneath the waters of Lake Superior.
Oil wells are worked out beyond the edge of the Pacific Ocean.
You may see the oil derricks just off Santa Barbara"s surf.
In the bay of San Francisco artesian wells, going through the preliminary depths of salt water, bring the water of fresh submarine springs to the surface.
But these little enterprises are but faint beginnings of the great work that man has to do in exploiting the wealth beneath the waters covering two-thirds of the earth"s surface.
This earth will be quite a romantic abode when sub-oceanic exploitation reaches full development, when the great gold mines beneath the waters are indicated simply by lat.i.tude and longitude.
Mars, with his huge ca.n.a.ls distributing a planet"s waters scientifically, will be matched perhaps by our network of tunnels under the water from here to Asia, and by our boring, with the aid of cooling mediums, toward the earth"s centre and bringing up metals in a molten state.
Before he finishes with her, man will make old earth know that he is at work "in her midst." He will make the harnessing of a tiny Niagara or the boring of a poor little isthmus seem feeble efforts.
WHERE YOUR BODY CAME FROM LET IT BE SCATTERED AS IT WAS GATHERED
Did you ever think about the construction of the body which you inhabit? Did it ever occur to you that your shoulders and hands and chest and legs and lungs are made of contributions from widely different parts of the earth?
Your brain, a wonderfully complex machine, the seat of thought and of the will, is packed away in darkness in the bony skull.
The heart, working ceaselessly, pumps the blood that feeds the brain and makes possible its work.
The eyes, with the aid of the nerves that perceive light, guide you. The ears, with the nerves that interpret sound waves, tell their story.
Like a central operator with a million wires leading to him, your INDIVIDUALITY, a wonderful mystery without form, matter or name, sits in your brain guiding the body. ----
Where did the body come from?
Part of it came from potatoes grown on Long Island, and part of it from spices grown in Ceylon.
In your nerves there is the extract of tea leaves gathered by a Chinese girl on the other side of the world. Your blood is purified and made red by the wind that blew across the Rocky Mountains only a few hours ago. That current of oxygen has helped build up your strength.
A month ago an ox was eating gra.s.s in Texas.
Many millions of years ago the pollen of huge fern trees was falling to the earth in the carboniferous era and making coal.
To-day, part of the backbone of the ox from Texas with the meat attached is laid on the fire of coal made by those fern trees, and the Texas ox and the fern pollen combined help to build up your body.
That same body is three-quarters water, and of that water part was once the Pacific Ocean; part, perhaps, was drunk up by a whale before it reached you; and part floated in clouds over the Southern Sea. ----
Your imagination can carry the picture as far as it will--to the fisherman catching your sardines in the North, and the dark man gathering your oranges in the South or your dates in some oasis.
We want to suggest this idea to you.
Since the body is gathered from all parts of the world, from all corners of our little speck of the material universe, should it not be scattered, at death, as it was gathered during life?
Is not the destruction of the body by fire far better than hideous burial in the earth?