THE 



ORIGIN OF DESTRUCTIVE INSECT PLAGUES 



AND 



GENERAL ATMOSPHERIC TROUBLES. 



HOW DISCOVERED. 



REMEDY. 



ETC. 



THE EVOLUTION OF OBSCURE TRUTHS. 



The African savage when he takes off his fur kaross is familiar with 

 the electric sparks which corn6 from it; but he views them with the eye 

 of an ox, and thinks nothing more about them. The American Indian, 

 in the dry climate of the United States, must constantly have seen these 

 sparks, but never dreamed of making Franklin's experiment by bringing 

 them down from a thunder-storm and showing that they were identical 

 with lightning. The science of electricity and all scientific conceptions 

 arise only when culture develops the human mind and compels it to give 

 a rational account of the world in which man " lives and moves and has 

 his being." One hundred and twenty years before the Christian era, 

 Hero, a renowned mechanician of Alexandria, Egypt, discovered the 

 power of steam when confined in a closed vessel, and he invented the 

 " selopile," a machine whose arms were propelled by the reaction of 

 issuing jets of steam. It was only an ingenious toy, but it contained 

 < the promise and potency" of the remarkable motor which twenty cen- 

 turies later re-invented by Papin and Savery, finally received its finishing 

 touches from the fertile brain and cunning hand of my illustrious coun- 

 tryman and townsman, James Watt, who left the steam engine the prac- 

 tically perfected machine of to-day, for whenever improvements have 

 been made they have been on lines laid down by Watt. In like manner 

 the illimitable store house of nature the fountain of all benificent ideas 

 has been from time to time explored by the agency of simple " ingenious 

 toys," etc. Sir Isaac Newton, for example, when playing as a little boy on 

 the bank of a favorite stream was led to perceive the hitherto unnoticed, 

 though immutable, law of attraction and repulsion by the agency of sun- 

 dry little globules of water gambolling in detached particles as they were 

 propelled from the adjacent bubbling brook; how that globules of equal 

 proportions were repellant to each other, whilst the smaller or more nega- 

 tive were attracted to and absorbed by the larger or more positive. It 

 should be needless in these enlightened times by any special reasonings 

 to affirm that this now universally recognized law intimately applies to 

 the whole of organic nature. Man, for instance, who is but a migratory 

 tree or shrub becomes, from various preventable causes, mentally and 

 physically enfeebled, and is in consequence, as are all manner of plants 

 susceptible to attacks from 



