第102章

For all that, it is a strange thing to see what numbers of new things are really old.There are many modern contrivances that are of as early date as the first man, if not thousands of centuries older.

Everybody knows how all the arrangements of our telescopes and microscopes are anticipated in the eye, and how our best musical instruments are surpassed by the larynx.But there are some very odd things any anatomist can tell, showing how our recent contrivances are anticipated in the human body.In the alimentary canal are certain pointed eminences called villi, and certain ridges called valvuloe conniventes.The makers of heating apparatus have exactly reproduced the first in the "pot" of their furnaces, and the second in many of the radiators to be seen in our public buildings.The object in the body and the heating apparatus is the same; to increase the extent of surface.--We mix hair with plaster (as the Egyptians mixed straw with clay to make bricks) so that it shall hold more firmly.But before man had any artificial dwelling the same contrivance of mixing fibrous threads with a cohesive substance had been employed in the jointed fabric of his own spinal column.India-rubber is modern, but the yellow animal substance which is elastic like that, and serves the same purpose in the animal economy which that serves in our mechanical contrivances, is as old as the mammalia.The dome, the round and the Gothic arch, the groined roof, the flying buttress, are all familiar to those who have studied the bony frame of man.All forms of the lever and all the principal kinds of hinges are to be met with in our own frames.The valvular arrangements of the blood-vessels are unapproached by any artificial apparatus, and the arrangements for preventing friction are so perfect that two surfaces will play on each other for fourscore years or more and never once trouble their owner by catching or rubbing so as to be felt or heard.

But stranger than these repetitions are the coincidences one finds in the manners and speech of antiquity and our own time.In the days when Flood Ireson was drawn in the cart by the Maenads of Marblehead, that fishing town had the name of nurturing a young population not over fond of strangers.It used to be said that if an unknown landsman showed himself in the streets, the boys would follow after him, crying, "Rock him! Rock him! He's got a long-tailed coat on!"Now if one opens the Odyssey, he will find that the Phaeacians, three thousand years ago, were wonderfully like these youthful Marbleheaders.The blue-eyed Goddess who convoys Ulysses, under the disguise of a young maiden of the place, gives him some excellent advice."Hold your tongue," she says, "and don't look at anybody or ask any questions, for these are seafaring people, and don't like to have strangers round or anybody that does not belong here."Who would have thought that the saucy question, "Does your mother know you're out?" was the very same that Horace addressed to the bore who attacked him in the Via Sacra?

Interpellandi locus hic erat; Est tibi mater?

Cognati, queis te salvo est opus?

And think of the London cockney's prefix of the letter h to innocent words beginning with a vowel having its prototype in the speech of the vulgar Roman, as may be seen in the verses of Catullus:

Chommoda dicebat, siquando commoda vellet Dicere, et hinsidias Arrius insidias.

Et tum mirifice sperabat se esse locutum, Cum quantum poterat, dixerat hinsidias...

Hoc misso in Syriam, requierant omnibus aures...

Cum subito affertur nuncius horribilis;

Ionios fluctus, postquam illue Arrius isset, Jam non Ionios esse, sed Hionios.

--Our neighbors of Manhattan have an excellent jest about our crooked streets which, if they were a little more familiar with a native author of unquestionable veracity, they would strike out from the letter of "Our Boston Correspondent," where it is a source of perennial hilarity.It is worth while to reprint, for the benefit of whom it may concern, a paragraph from the authentic history of the venerable Diedrich Knickerbocker:

"The sage council, as has been mentioned in a preceding chapter, not being able to determine upon any plan for the building of their city,--the cows, in a laudable fit of patriotism, took it under their peculiar charge, and as they went to and from pasture, established paths through the bushes, on each side of which the good folks built their houses; which is one cause of the rambling and picturesque turns and labyrinths, which distinguish certain streets of New York at this very day."--When I was a little boy there came to stay with us for a while a young lady with a singularly white complexion.Now I had often seen the masons slacking lime, and I thought it was the whitest thing Ihad ever looked upon.So I always called this fair visitor of ours Slacked Lime.I think she is still living in a neighboring State, and I am sure she has never forgotten the fanciful name I gave her.

But within ten or a dozen years I have seen this very same comparison going the round of the papers, and credited to a Welsh poet, David Ap Gwyllym, or something like that, by name.

--I turned a pretty sentence enough in one of my lectures about finding poppies springing up amidst the corn; as if it had been foreseen by nature that wherever there should be hunger that asked for food, there would be pain that needed relief,--and many years afterwards.I had the pleasure of finding that Mistress Piozzi had been beforehand with me in suggesting the same moral reflection.