網頁圖片
PDF
ePub 版

that magnet which I showed you the other day. And when you fall out of a tree, do you fall away from the earth or toward it?" "Toward it; but the water would run off if the world rolled over." "James, see what your little sister is doing; can you tell?"

"Whirling spit on a hair," replied he, with a giggle.

"The same power that holds the spit to the hair, holds the water to the moving world. Now repeat-The world is round, like a ball. Men can sail around it. There are two hemispheres, the eastern and the western. We live on the western hemisphere," etc.

Next day I took the globe, stood by the stove, and inquired

"What must I do ?"

"Make the world fly," the children said.

"Then fancy the stove is the sun, and the earth goes rolling round ;" and I put my fingers on the poles, and walked in an ellipse, saying, "Now the sun rises on America; little boys and girls get up, go to school, go home, and soon go to bed, while the sun shines on other lands;" and the bright fire in the gloomy corner made them comprehend it readily, as I turned the globe around before the light. We amused ourselves so for some time, the larger children taking my place; then we repeated what we had learned. "The earth turns on its axis. It turns once in twentyfour hours. It goes round the sun in three hundred and sixty-five days."

For their next drawing-lesson I bade them draw a circle, and imitate the outlines of the zones. This they did very neatly with pencil and red chalk. Then holding the globe before the fire, I asked, "Which part of the globe do you think is warmest; this?" laying my finger near the equator; "or that?" touching the arctic circle. All agreed the equator was hottest.

"Which part of your picture represents the hot part?"

"The red."

Yes; the red is called the torrid zone; the blue is the frigid, or cold and the yellow is the temperate, or mild zone."

zone;

Next day we read "Uncle Toby's Talk with Robert and Mary." When the lesson was over, a boy came to me, saying-" Please tell us how the sun is not seen in some places for months at a time."

So I held the globe before the fire at an angle of 23°, and turning it round, asked if they could see any part that did not come into the light? "Yes," they replied; "the part where your right hand rests is dark, and by your left it is light all the time."

"So it is with the earth; it leans over, warming one end at a time; so, while it is winter at the north pole, it is summer at the south pole. Now, watch the world roll ;" and I carefully turned it till I came to the opposite side, when the children exclaimed—

"The south pole is out in the cold now, while the north pole suns itself." Here, the high-school sent for the globe; so we bade it good-by, and

turning to the map, learned its main divisions of land and water, explaining what islands, capes, etc., were, but not requiring any set definitions. In a few weeks many were familiar with the map; and while we reviewed, I described Dr. Kane's long night in the Arctic regions; the wilds of British America; the hills of New England, sending out their busy brooks to turn so many mills; the plantations and swamps of the South; the rich bosom of the Mississippi, and the barren plains and Rocky Mountains beyond, rich with Californian gold.

Then we visited the luxuriant wilds of the Amazon; the diamond coast of Brazil, and the treasures of Peru. England, the home of many of our ancestors, kept us awhile; Germany was interesting to many as their own fatherland. Then we viewed the rest of Europe, and passed over to Egypt, where flows the Nile, "like a bright thought in a troubled dream." We crossed the great desert to the land of savage men and beasts; then to idol-loving India, careful China and Japan, and then homeward through the Coral Islands.

"Now, don't you think we need a new map ?" inquired the scholars. But the high-school had none to spare, so I had them name all the wild animals in the neighborhood; then all the tame ones, and where they came from; then all the animals they ever heard of. One little girl had seen a hippopotamus, and wanted to know where it lived; and I told them the story of the capture of a calf on the banks of the Nile, which I had read in Parker & Watson's Reader.

I had them name all the plants they had seen; then those that grow in the United States; then those that are natives of foreign lands.

We named the different articles bought at the stores; learning about the manufacture of cloth, soap, salt, saleratus, candles, glass, ironwork, etc. Then we found whence came tea, sugar, coffee, silk, wines, oranges, lemons, cocoa, etc.

I was surprised at the interest they showed. When the time came for pointing on the map, a host of little hands were ready. They began to stay in from recess, and cluster round the map, till I forbade it; and when I arrived at school, it was generally surrounded by a group of boys, each with a stick, talking about "the backbone of America ;" the islands where spices grow ;" "Arabia, where the best horses are found;""Cape Farewell," "Iceland," and a Babel of like sounds.

[ocr errors]

Several wished to study geography; but as the term was nearly ended, and no two had like books, I was obliged to refuse. Of course, this method is fit only for beginners. After text-books are taken, stick close to your text.

Ir is said that M. Thiers has completed a history of Florence, in ten volumes, and that he has sold it for $100,000.

CURIOUS ARITHMETICAL CALCULATIONS.

"Whenever Dr. Johnson felt his fancy disordered, his constant recurrence was to the study of arithmetic; and one day that he was totally confined to his chamber, and I inquired what he had been doing to divert himself, he showed me a calculation which I could scarce be made to understand, so vast was the plan of it, and so very intricate were the figures; no other, indeed, than that the national debt, computing it at one hundred and eighty millions sterling, would, if converted into silver, serve to make a meridian of that metal, I forget how broad, for the globe of the whole earth-the real globe."

W1

HEN a mind like Dr. Johnson's can be diverted, amused, and regulated by so simple a calculation as the one recorded in the above anecdote, with so much wonder and admiration, by his friend, Madam Piozzi, it may reasonably be supposed that some entertainment and instruction may be derived from an examination of a few extracts from a work in manuscript, entitled "Curious Calculations," designed to interest, amuse, and instruct the young. Besides containing many short and practical methods of calculation, useful to accountants, it has a rare collection of arithmetical questions, puzzles, paradoxes, magic squares, and games, to please and divert the mind, awaken curiosity, arouse the thinking faculties, and incite a desire to examine and understand the wonderful properties of figures.

SPECULATION IN GOLD.

Suppose that some one of your ancestors, at the commencement of the Christian era, had been so provident as to leave you one cent, to accumulate at the rate of six per cent. per annum, compound interest, until the end of the year 1860. How many dollars would you receive, and where would you find room enough to store away its value in gold?

Thinking it might be interesting to many readers to trace the history of this small beginning to its present enormous growth, I have amused myself during some leisure hours by making the following calculation.

Money, at six per cent. per annum, compound interest, doubles itself in a little less than twelve years. For the sake of convenience, and to keep within the limits, we will call it twelve years. Then, the principal, one cent, will be doubled one hundred and fifty-five times in eighteen hundred and sixty years. This increase is found, by laborious computation, to reach the enormous sum of four hundred and fifty-six tredecillions of dollars— an amount so inconceivably great as to require for its expression a line of forty-five places of figures.

Being quite certain that all the gold brought from the land of Ophir, in the days of Solomon, all the Pactolean streams that ever enriched a Croesus, all the wealth of Plutus's mine, all the gold ever seen by mortal eye, all the hidden treasure yet to be discovered, will be but a drop in the ocean, let us try to form some idea of the quantity of gold required, by

borrowing the philosopher's stone, and changing the whole world into one solid mass of virgin gold, and then see if we should have enough for our purpose.

Estimating pure gold at the moderate valuation of sixteen dollars an ounce, a cubic foot of the precious metal will be worth 280,000 dollars. This fact being ascertained, the value of any given quantity of gold may readily be computed; and the world is found to be worth ten thousand seven hundred septillions of dollars-a sum requiring twenty-nine places of figures. If the reader will now compare the value of our golden globe with the amount of interest derived from the insignificant little cent, he will find that forty-two thousand four hundred and twenty billions of golden worlds will be necessary to satisfy our demand.

Let us now try if there is matter enough in the bright sun itself, which, on any pleasant morning, may easily be imagined to be made of burnished gold. The sun is five hundred times larger than all the planets and their satellites together; and, if it were a hollow sphere, one million five hundred thousand globes like ours might be dropped within its capacious cavern: but yet we must have thirty thousand three hundred millions of golden suns to answer the question.

Finding that we can not arrive at any appreciable quantity of matter to be converted into gold, that will give us any idea of the magnitude of the sum under consideration, let us imagine a sphere large enough to contain thirty thousand three hundred millions of suns; we shall then have enough gold to cancel the claims of our interesting little principal.

A golden globe of such prodigious dimensions must have a diameter of two thousand seven hundred and fifty millions of miles. Suppose we consider the sun as the center of this ponderous mass; then, by traveling out far away into the regions of space, four hundred and seventy-five millions of miles beyond the orbit of Saturn, the most interesting of all the planets of the solar system, and distant from the sun nine hundred millions of miles, we shall reach a point at whose distance from the sun, through the realms of ether, we can describe the majestic sweep of a circle, which may be conceived to be the circumference of the mighty globe that, in imagination, we are endeavoring to find. So extensive is the track of this circle, that it would take a team of trotters, at a 2-30 gait, forty-two thousand years to spin around it.

This globe, then, would require the sun for a golden center; all the space between it and the orbit of Mercury to be of gold; all the space between Mercury and Venus, all the space between Venus and this particle of golden sand, the Earth; and so on, to Mars, Jupiter, and beyond Saturn, swallowing up planets and their satellites, the asteroids, and forming one stupendous golden ball, reaching out in all directions from its center, the sun, to the distance of one thousand three hundred and seventy-five millions of miles.

THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH.

Mrs. Smith's Parlor.-Present: MRS. SMITH, MRS. BROWN, MARY SMITH, JEMIMA Brown, MISS ST. CLAIR, MISS GORDON, MISS GRAHAM.

Mrs. Smith. As you say, Mrs. Brown, the Queen's English is good enough for me; no matter if it don't suit my Moll or Miss Mary Smythe, as she has printed on them little cards she takes when she goes a-visiting.

Mrs. Brown. Cards! Sakes alive, she don't play cards, do she? I'm main glad I didn't send my Jemima to that grand school your Molly's come from. She's got more foolish notions now than's good for her. Why, don't you think she wants her father to get a befix to his name, becos she discovered that our descendants were called Le Brun before the flood!

Mrs. Smith. Dear, dear, what is this world a-coming to? I shouldn't be surprised to find some morning we had turned summersault in the night, and were in a state of universal emancipation in the uttermost parts of the earth. These new-fangled idees beat me. I came in the other day, tired out, for Moll to help me get dinner-for helps is all hindrances now. Says I, "What's the use of all Moll's larning and ologies, if she don't know cook-ology and sweep-ology?" But, bless your heart, she hadn't learned nary one of 'em! I found her in the parlor telling some young chap how glad she was to be free! "Free from scholastic regulations," she said; but if they're any relations of mine, I don't know it. I sot and listened while she described the alterations she was going to git her par to make. She was going to have a boaydoor opening inter a memorandah, and a kivered portfolio with marble steps, and rustic lounges on the memorandah quite permiscuous. That was too much for me. Says I: "You can have your boaydoors, or any other kind of doors, but as to them lazy loungers, I ain't a going to have none of 'em coming about my premises. If you larned such nonsense in your Young Ladies' Cemetery' you've got to forgit it in double-quick!" The young chap, who had disremembered until then that he was in a violent hurry to go down-town, took his hat and his departer !

སྙ

Mrs. Brown. And a very good thing, too. The young chaps now-adays look like a tailor's advertisement. I wonder if they don't get their clothes for walking round to show 'em.

Mrs. Smith. Well, I daresay. But here comes Moll; I left her putting on her "robey de charms!"

Miss Smith. Robe-de-chambre, mamma; my morning-dress.

Mrs. Smith. Well, any thing you like, Moll.

Miss Smith. For pity sake, mamma, drop that old-fashioned appellation! I so much prefer being called Marie !"

Mrs. Smith. And do you think I'd make such a dunce of myself?

« 上一頁繼續 »