ALUMINIUM. 



As life fleets on, and as acquaintance with human character 

 and susceptibilities becomes more extended, one learns that 

 knowledge is never so readily appreciated as when coming 

 before us in a tangible and palpable shape. There are many, 

 many thousand things which you and I must take for granted 

 on authority, without the chance of being able to demonstrate 

 them, or having them demonstrated to us. 7, for instance, 

 should expect you to believe, were I to aver that the blood 

 which now rushes through our arteries, or steals sluggishly 

 along through our veins, contains a large percentage of iron. 

 In averring this, I should tell you nothing that you had not 

 probably heard before, the existence of iron in the blood being 

 a fact now tolerably well known ; but if you could, like me at 

 this instant, have before you a coil of iron wire more than three 

 yards long made from iron extracted from human blood, the fact 

 would come before you in a palpable guise of tenfold more 

 expressiveness. 



As to me, though the presence of iron in the blood has 

 been no novelty for the last thirty years at least, nevertheless 

 I sit and gaze at my three-yard specimen of blood-extracted 

 iron wire, ponder over and contemplate it, until my mind is 

 lost in a region of abstractions. I view it with the interest of 

 a cherished relic. I would not sell it for many times its weight 

 in gold, valuing it as I do for associations. It brings tangibly 

 before me the existence of an old friend in a strange place ; 



