Scrape away with your sea shells, but try also to give a few more
and a few better chances in youth to those whom you now hunt as
criminals in their mature years.
God creates boys and girls, anxious to live decently.
YOUR SOCIAL SYSTEM makes criminals and fills jails.
THE WONDERFUL MAGNET
HOW WILD SUPERSTITION SETTLES DOWN INTO SCIENTIFIC REALITY
Everybody knows something of the peculiarities of the magnet. As
a boy you led tiny painted ducks around the water basin, holding
a magnet in your hand, or you owned a horseshoe magnet that would
pick up nails and needles.
You know now in a general kind of way that the magnet is a very
useful as well as a somewhat mysterious thing.
The old Greeks and Romans simply knew that some remarkable iron
ore found in Lydia, near the town of Magnesia, and hence called
magnet, was capable of drawing and holding pieces of metal.
The ancients had the wildest theories concerning the magnet, just
as we have wild theories about things that are new and strange to
us to-day.
They thought that the magnet could be used in cases of sickness,
that it could attract wood and flesh, that it influenced the
human brain, causing melancholy. They believed that the power of
a magnet could be destroyed by rubbing garlic on it, and that
power brought back again by dipping the magnet in goat's blood.
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