HOW TO LEARN. What a mechanic needs most, to-day is to know how to think. A man who can do this is never at fault for ways or means; he can meet any emergency. If a difficult job comes along, he rises to it and enjoys conquering the difficulty. He is an inventor. He invents hundreds of things every month of his life. Such a man loves dearly to go on a tramp. He loves to go into every shop and factory and use his eyes. That man is a scholar. He is at school all the time. He has learned the one vital lesson and knowledge is his. Our man has learned how to learn. Not a shop oes he enter, but something appears which he wishes He learns a new kink while he is watching Bob light his pipe or set a lathe tool. He finds a treasure where Mike would see nothing but steel, scrap iron and $2 a day. to see. Perhaps our man has got half an idea as to some improvement to a machine. He is working up his odd minutes in perfecting his invention. As he walks through a shop he sees a jig for some peculiar job. It is nothing but a couple of screws and two pieces of iron, yet it suggests something, and his invention is perfected. Like a flash the mind catches the idea of what is wanted, yet the article which suggested it is no more like it than "elbow grease" is like "taper oil." When you learn a trade or study a lesson, then learn how to think and how to catch new ideas. Learn this thing, and if you can do it the trade is yours. DO IT NOW. rest follow into file and following after like a company of well-drilled soldiers; and though work may be hard to meet when it charges in a squad, it is easily vanquished if you can bring it in line. You may have often seen the anecdote of the man who was asked how he accomplished so much in his life? 'My father taught me," was the reply, "when I had anything to do, to go and do it." There is the secret--the magic word now! CARDINALS. According to an exchange, the Pope appoints a cardinal in a consistory, the chief ceremony being the delivery of the scarlet hat, with the words: Esto cardinalis, "Be a cardinal," and the dignitary so created is thereafter presumed to be a cardinal's hat had three scarlet knots, brother of the chief pontiff. At first the fringes or tassels on each side; these were increased to five, while archbishops had of green material. During the last two four of purple color, and bishops three, four green ones, and prelates, abbots and centuries, however, bishops have worn Their dress consists of a red soutane, or prothonotaries three of purple or black. cassock, with a cincture with tassels of gold, red caps and stockings, a rochet and a large cloak, with an ermine cappa in who wears a purple soutane and cincture, winter. Every cardinal has his chaplain, a surplice and stole-like scarf, with which he supports his master's mitre when not When the Pope officiactually worn. ates, or in a procession, the cardinals wear white damask mitres, red shoes, and if bishops, a cope; if priests, a chasuble; if deacons, a dalmatic. In times of penance the color of their robes is velvet; and on a few particular days rose instead of red. Their dress of state when not engaged in sacred functions consists in a large purple mantle called a crocia; on less important occasions, of a mantelet, or short cloak, through which they put their arms, and worn over the rochet, while over this is a mozzetta, or tippet, showing only the chain of a pectoral cross. Don't live a single hour of your life without doing exactly what is to be done in it, and going straight through it from beginning to end. Work, play, study, whatever it is--take hold at once, and finish it up squarely and cleanly, and then to the next thing, without letting any moments drop between them. It is wonderful to see how many hours these prompt people contrive to make out of a day; it is as if they picked up the moments that the dawdlers lost. And if THE ETIQUETTE OF RETIRING. ever you find yourself where you have It is always a debatable point of etiso many things upon you that you hard-quette whether the hostess or guest ly know how to begin, let us tell you a secret, Take hold of the very first one that comes to hand, and you will find all the makes the first movement to go to bed, and thus break up the evening gathering. The guest may be overcome with fatigue from a day's journey, the host may be fidgeting under the strain of entertaining, and longing for the guest to show some signs by which he can gracefully and hospitably suggest "that it is growing late," yet neither quite like to appear, as they think, impolite. In fact, many visitors have suffered agonies in trying to be agreeable while the host and hostess were doing their best to suppress their yawns and to "make conversation" until chance offered a solution of the difficulty. There is, however, but one rule to be followed in this relationship of host and hostess and the hour of retirement. The host or hostess must always take the initiative and say an appropriate word as to the lateness of the hour and the desirability of going to bed. A Boston lady who has entertained numerous 'house parties" relates it as her experience that the visitors she most dreads are "owls" who like to sit up till all is blue. Many is the time she says, she has regretted the days of her childhood, when nurse appeared at the drawing room door promptİy at nine o'clock and carried her off to bed. How gladly would she now welcome the apparition of the nursery tyrant when obliged to find entertainment until midnight for people who were as anxious, perhaps, as herself to go to their rooms. THE BIBLE. No fragment of an army ever survived so many battles as the Bible; no citadel ever withstood so many sieges; no rock was ever battered by so many hurricanes and so swept by storms. And yet it stands. It has seen the rise and downfall of Daniel's four empires. Assyria bequeaths a few mutilated figures to the riches of our National museum. Medea and Persia, like Babylon which they conquered, have been weighed in the balance, and long ago found wanting. Greece faintly survives in its historic fame; and iron Rome of the Cæsars long since ceased to boast; and yet the book that foretells all this still survives. While nations, kings, philosophers, systems, institutions, have died away, the Bible engages now men's deepest thoughts, is examined by the highest tribunals, is more read and sifted and debated; more devoutly loved and more vehemently assailed, more defended and more denied, more industriously translated and freely given to the world, more honored and more abused than any other book the world ever saw. It survives all changes, itself unchanged; it moves all minds, yet is moved by none; it sees all things decay, itself incorruptible; it sees myriads of other books engulfed in the stream of time, yet is borne along till the mystic angel shall plant his foot upon the sea and swear by Him that liveth forever and ever that time shall be no longer. NEW METHOD FOR PROTECTING IRON. A new method, which promises to be easier of application than any previous, has been lately brought out by M. A. De Meritens, the well-known electrician, and if it succeeds as well in the hands of the public as it does with the inventor, should find a very extended application. The article to be protected is placed in a bath of ordinary or distilled water, at a temperature of from 70° to 80° Centigrade (158° to 176° Fah.), and an electric current is sent through. The water is decomposed into its elements, oxygen and hydrogen, and the oxygen is deposited on the metal, while the hydrogen appears at the other pole, which may either be the tank in which the operation is conducted or a plate of carbon or metal. The current has only sufficient electromotive force to overcome the resistance of the circuit and to decompose the water, for if it be stronger than this, the oxygen combines with the iron to produce a pulverulent oxide which has no adherence. If the conditions are as they should be, it is only a few minutes after the oxygen appears at the metal before the darkening of the surface shows that the gas has united with the iron to form the magnetic oxide Fe2O, which it is well known will resist the action of the air, and protect the metal beneath it. After the action has continued an hour or two the coating is sufficiently solid to resist the scratch brush, and it will then take a brilliant polish. The process is simple, and demands but little skill in its execution. Now that dynamo machines have superseded batteries as sources of electricity, all that is required is a tank, a quantity of distilled water, and a little power to drive the machine. "Women's work is never done." This suggests a coincidence with the undercrust of some women's pie, of which the same may be said. Scientific. WONDERS OF SCIENCE. GLASS AND HOW IT IS MADE-THE AN- PROVING IN AMERICA. As a result of years of glass-blowing by the mouth, cases have been known in which men's cheeks have been worn so thin that they have actually cracked, and it is a common sight in a bottlehouse to see the blowers at work, with their thin cheeks puffed out like the fingers of a glove. The furnace is heated by the gas. Into it is set a fire-brick pot. What is glass? In chemistry glass is A round opening gives access to the pot. any product of fusion having the pecu- In the pot the materials which make the liar lustre known as vitreous, hard and glass are put, to be fused all together. brittle, whether transparent or not. To They consist of 100 parts of sand, 30 the aid of glass applied in a thousand parts of lime, 40 parts alkali, and some different forms, the sciences, particularly pulverized charcoal. It must be an inchemistry and astronomy, are essentially tense heat, like that of a volcano, which indebted for their advancement, and its will melt all these hard materials touses in common life render it no less im-gether. portant to the daily wants of mankind. A great many conjectures are made in regard to the origin of glass-making, but, after all, Pliny's story of the sailors dis covering it by accident on the Phenician coast was long ago disapproved by the finding of glass among the most ancient relics of Egyptian industrial art. Irish traveler named Mahon says: "I was once in an Arab glass factory at Hebron, where they were making opaque glass beads and objects identical in quality and character with glass beads I had myself found on the ornamental wrappings of an Egyptian lady who died more than three thousand years ago. There is no reason to think it a wild idea that when Abraham lived at Hebron glass was made somewhere near there, and has been made there more or less continually ever since. Nor were the Egyptians and Phenicians (the art purveyors of ancient times) and the Greeks and the Romans less skilled than our glassmakers in producing exquisitely beautiful glass. The Egyptians made strips of glass rods of many-colored glass threads so skillfully It presently becomes the shape of a and wonderfully wrought that when they huge_bottle without any neck to speak cut off thin slices of the rod each slice of. When the mass runs too much to was a beautiful picture of bird or beast the lower end he must lift it in the air till in rich colors. It is highly probable that it runs back to the upper end. in old Egypt glass was applied to the requires great strength. The bottle is uses and adornments of life quite as ex-five feet long by this time and a foot The next step is tensively as in our day, and that if we and a half across. could recover some objects then made our to blow out the bottom of the bottle and glass makers would be astonished. It is make an open-ended cylinder of it. The at least probable that a statue nine cubits workman blows into his pipe and puts high, which ancient writers describe as his hand over the opening. The air exmade of a single emerald, was actually pands in the heat, and the next moment made of glass. The ancient Irish under- he hears a little pop. The air has blown stood glass-making. Whence this art a small hole in the end of the red-hot holcame to men, we have said no. one low mass to get out at. The blower twists his tube around and around, and puffs knows. A glass furnace is indeed the hottest place known to man. The materials are brought to the molten state. Then they are skimmed to get the refuse off. Next the workman plunges a long wroughtiron tube with a wooden handle and Anmouthpiece into the white hot mess. Part of it adheres to the end of the pipe. He rolls it around, takes it out until it cools the pot again. More glass adheres until slightly, and then plunges the pipe into at length there is a ball on the end of the tube weighing many pounds. For a plate of glass as large as the one mentioned a ball of the molten material weighing over thirty pounds is required. It needs a weight. When he gets a red hot ball of very strong man to manipulate this glass large enough he rests it a moment in a wet wooden mould and turns it the first man hands the pipe with a redabout until it is pear shaped. At length hot ball at the end to the blower. He blows gently into it, turning it constantly the while. This his breath into it until the opening gets larger, and a perfect cylinder takes the place of the bottle. A string of red-hot glass drawn around the upper end of the cylinder breaks it evenly off at the neck from the iron blowpipe. Then it is cracked open lengthwise from end to end by a hot iron. It is carried to a great hearth and melted till it becomes soft enough to lie out flat. Then it is what it has been meant for all along, a great sheet of plate glass, ready to be tempered, ironed flat and brilliant, and put in a huge window to show the goods inside This is the whole process of making plate glass. The fahle of a stone age of the human race is imaginative. The line of civilization possessing the arts goes back into the remotest periods of history. The history of glass illustrates this. It is a material made by the union of silex with an alkali. So it always was. It is harder or softer according to the quantity and quality of the materials and the flux used in the combination. So it was thousands of years ago and ever since. It takes colors from various metals or oxides of metals melted with it. All civilized races have colored it with much the same materials. It is beautiful to our tastes in a variety of colors. All the ages have had the same tastes and used it to gratify them. It can be made to imitate the rare precious stones. In all ages it has been used for that purpose. Paste gems were common in Egypt, Greece and Rome. Its fitness in the arts of utility has made it to be useful for men in all these times. The different collections of glass are wonderfully instructive to the nineteenth century in this department of art, showing the identity of human desires, habits and customs in the use of glass two thousand years ago and now. The art collections of glass are fully equal to any others, and in its general historical character much superior to any collection of ancient relics. creased over 15,000 per cent., a steady gain in the production of over 1,500 per cent. per annum. The Baku wells in Russia now yield over 500,000 tons a year, and one well that has been bored in that vicinity is capable of discharging 8,000 tons a day, and will do so when the proper machinery is provided. The main objection heretofore to the use of petroleum as fuel for steamers and locomotives has been the cost, but if the oil springs up as freely as water the cost must decrease. I feel warranted, therefore, in predicting that the day is not far distant when oilers will take the place of coal passers on many railroad and steamship lines. THE TREATMENT OF PNEUMONIA. About a half a century ago, Mr. Samuel McEvatt, now of Paterson, N. J., was cured of pneumonia by a very simple course of treatment, which not only restored him to health, but left him with unimpaired lungs. He has since made use of the same treatment in a number of cases, several of which were unusually severe and had been given up as hopeless. In all of them, however, he met with entire success, and consequently desires to publish the remedy, in the hope that it will be a benefit to others. Leeches, fomentation and linseed poultices are the three necessary elements in this course of treatment. If the case is severe, and great difficulty in breathing is experienced, six leeches are used, but ordinarily four will be found sufficient. These are applied on the back, as close as possible to the shoulder blade. The patient should be sitting up and leaning slightly forward, in order to support the leeches. The skin under the shoulder blade is first washed in a little sweetened milk. The leeches are then placed in a glass about two and a half inches wide, which is carefully turned upside down over the spot indicated. It is well to have the glass touch the shoulder blade, and be held a little toward the spine. There is a probability that before a may be removed when the leeches have very long period oil may come into gen- once taken hold. As soon as they drop eral use as fuel on locomotives and steam- off, flannel cloths dipped into boiling ers. Some years ago this did not seem water are applied to the wounds, and likely, but the marvelous increase recent this process of fomentation kept up for ly reported from many parts of the globe half an hour. During this time the water in the production of petroleum upsets all from which the cloths are taken must be former calculations. Within the past ten maintained at almost a boiling heat. years the yield from the wells in the This part of the treatment removes more neighborhood of the Caspian Sea has in-blood than the leeches. Two or three RUN BY PETROLEUM. It linseed roultices are then applied to the wounds in quick succession. The patient will be extremely weak from the loss of blood, and some simple and easily digested nourishment should be administered. The impeded respiration, Mr. McEvatt states, will soon give place to an easy breathing. He has had an opportunity of treating a number of cases, and has met with such constant success that he believes himself justified in saying that if these simple directions are faithfully carried out, the patient will be quite safe. We feel obliged, however, to add a word of caution. Pneumonia is a disease of so serious a nature that wherever possible it would be much wiser to consult a physician, and permit him to decide whether the patient could safely be subjected to this course of treatment. It is one of the recognized modes for strong, healthy persons to give them a single full bleeding; but where the patients are feeble or well advanced in years, the loss of any considerable amount of blood would not be admissible. In case of emergency, when no physician is available, or where he has made a careful examination of the patient, and decides that the system can stand the strain of losing so much blood without injury, we have reason to be lieve, from the evidence submitted, that the method of treatment here recommended would prove very beneficial, but like all other treatments it must be employed with discretion; strict regard being had to the condition of the patient, and his physical ability to endure the treatment here indicated. PACK THE LUNGS WITH AIR. Deep breathing and holding of the breath is an item of importance. Persons of weak vitality find an uninterrupted succession of deep and rapid respiration so distressing that they are discouraged from persevering in the exercise. Let such persons take into the lungs as much air as they can at a breath and hold it as long as they can, and they will find a grateful sense of relief in the whole abdominal region. Practice will increase ability to hold the breath and the capacity of the lungs. After a time the art may be learned of packing the lungs. This is done by taking and holding the long breath and then forcing more air down the trachea by swallows of air. The operation may be described by that of a fish's mouth in water. To those COLOR PERCEPTION BY THE HUMAN EYE. The fatigue of the human eye in connection with observations of colored objects, especially when these are brightly illuminated, has been explained in La Nature by M. Rosenstiehl and others. These remarks have recently been collated, with the published results of novel experiments, by M. Albert de Rochas. It has been laid down by M. Chevreul that the human eye cannot be long employed in the perception of a given color without tending to become insensible, and to arouse an impression similar to that ordinarily produced by the perception of white light. Dr. Beclard has also noticed that when one eye is directed for a time upon a colored field, the other eye being closed, if the eye which is open is in turn closed and the other opened, a spectrum of the complementary color will be perceived. Thus, if the right eye has observed a red disk, the left being shut, a reversal of this state of things would result in the perception of a green disk by the freshly opened left eye. In virtue of the same property of the eye, when two tints are placed beside each other, the nearest edge of the one will appear as though deprived of all the colored rays which it may have in common with the other. An analogous effect is produced with grays non coloredthat is to say, formed simply of white and black. When a dark and a light gray are placed side by side, the one will look darker and the other lighter, beside the line of junction, as though the black had been taken out of the one and the white out of the other. Hence the difficulty in estimating the equality of different colored lights. When they are looked at simultaneously, the eye passes from one to the other, and both colors are subject to a double modification-first of tint (for each tends to become the complementary of the other), then of tone; the light one appearing more light, and the dark one still darker. |