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GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE 



April, 1917 



accept Christ and unite with the church than men. 

 In our pennl institutions seven or eight times as 

 many men as women are found. Men swear a 

 hundred times where women swear once; they use 

 a ton of tobacco where women use a pound; they 

 drink a barrel of whisky where women drink a 

 pint ; they sow their " wild oats " where women sow 

 purity and love. Are these social and moral 

 differences conclusive demonstrations that men are 

 inherently more depraved than women, and that 

 women are inherently more moral than men ? For 

 ages man's selfish interests have led him to affirm 

 this to be true. During the same period of time 

 woman's acquiescent nature and fondness for com- 

 pliments have led her to accept this general opinion. 

 Never in the history of human cupidity was a clever- 

 er trick pulled off by man. 



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nature's skilled ARTISANS. 



A few evenings ago our neighbor, Mr. 

 E. B. Rood, said in prayer-meeting, by 

 way of illustration, that the point of the 

 finest needle, under the microscope, looked 

 like an awkward unfinished crow-bar in 

 comparison with the sting of a bee. He 

 was comparing God's work with man's. 

 The work of the bee in creating the waxy 

 cells has often been commented on. Well, 

 our old friend A. T. Cook has just given 

 me another surprise along in the same 

 line. See below : 



We have a colony of wild beavers about 12 miles 

 east of here. Nobody seems to know where they 

 came from. 



I went to see their work, and brought home 

 souvenirs. I enclose a few chips. 



They have built a dam at the outlet of a lake, 

 raising the water fully 3 feet. 



Scores of trees are cut down. Many of them 

 measure 7 to 10 inches in diameter. Their home 

 is in one of the wildest places I have ever seen. 

 Their dam is 40 or 50 feet long. A. T. Cook. 



Hyde Park, New York, Jan. 4. 



Were I not told these chips were the 

 work of beavers I should say they were 

 certainly m.ade by a skilled workman with 

 the keenest of tools, well tempered and 

 sharpened for the work. ''Manifold aie 

 thy wonderful works, Lord." 



AVILBUR AND ORVILLE WRIGHT. 



As I was Avith the Wright Brothers 

 when they made their first success in get- 

 ting the machine to turn around and come 

 back to the starting-place, you can realize 

 somewhat the pain I felt when I saw, as 

 the years have passed, efforts to rob them 

 of their hard-earned title to being the origin- 

 ators of the art of flying. In view of this 

 you may realize how it rejoiced my heart to 

 find the following in Collier's for Jan. G: 



THE TITIiE TO AN HONOR. 



We should have thought that, if the authority of 

 the great inventions of history were investigated, 

 the one upon which the least shadow of doubt could 

 be cast would be the invention of the aeroplane by 

 Orville and Wilbur Wright. Of course there will 



always be a certain number of whimsical persons 

 who instinctively resent giving credit where credit 

 is due, and who, when anything big is done in 

 the world, begin to look around for a village ob- 

 scurity " who really conceived the idea." They 

 like to be cheated and fooled. They are the same 

 kind of people who still believe in the Keely motor, 

 think Dr. Cook discovered the North Pole, Bacon 

 wrote Shakespeare's plays, and Rostand stole 

 "-Cyrano de Bergerac " from a Chicago dealer in 

 suburban real estate. But it is surprising to 

 find that so well informed a man as Dr. Eliot^^to 

 whose judgment on any subject we usually defer — 

 is reported to have ascribed the creation of the 

 flying machine to Professor Langley. Professor 

 Langley was a brilliant, ingenious, and modest 

 scientist. We mean no disrespect to his memory 

 when we say that Langley was, no more than 

 Darius Green, the inventor of the essential con- 

 trivances for flying. 



The attempt to discredit the originality of the 

 Wrights, and to rob two fine Americans of an 

 honor that will outlive all marble, started with a 

 group of men who took out of the Smithsonian 

 Institution the old Langley machine which had been 

 wrecked in launching, changed the shape and 

 weight of the ribs, the shape of the propellers, the 

 controlling device, the starting and landing gear, 

 added a number of devices which were peculiarly 

 the inventions of the Wrights, secured a competent 

 press agent, and turned the machine over to a 

 skilled aeronaut, who, after much effort, succeeded 

 in making the flying-machine — not fly^ — but hop. 

 Between this confection and the Wright aeroplane 

 as much difference e.xists as between a squat toad 

 and a swallow. And, bad as it was, this was not 

 the original Langley machine, but an industrious im- 

 provement on it. The old Langley machine, we 

 are told on good authority, " failed to fly because 

 the wings collapsed from not being strong enough 

 to carry the strain ; even if it had been strong 

 enough it would not have been a practical flying- 

 machine, because it had no means of control except 

 in a perfect calm ; it was the discovery of a means 

 of control, the solution of the problem of equilibrium 

 by the Wright brothers — and by them alone — that 

 conquered the domain of air for mankind and 

 brought in the age of flying." 



Langley's unsuccessful attempts were made only 

 after the Wrights had completed their invention 

 and progressed far in the actual use of it. They 

 had proved out their system of control by gliding: 

 fliglits in 1902, and had thereby solved the problem 

 of human flight, and they filed their application 

 for their fundamental patent in March, 1903. It 

 was not until more than six months after the latter 

 da'e that Langley made his unsuccessful attempts at 

 flying — the only ones that he did make. These at- 

 tempts were made on Oct. 7 and Dec. 8, 1903. 

 They proved nothing but failures, and added noth.ing 

 to the contribution that the Wrights had made to the 

 science in the previous year. On December 17, 

 1903, the Wrights again made completely successful 

 flights, but this time with a power-driven machine, 

 and as a result of their quiet, unadvcrtised. and 

 well-directed work. 



Collier's takes a special interest in this question 

 1 ecause it had the good fortune to be among the 

 first of .\merican publications to believe these two 

 modest yo'iii-i- men had solved the prol;le:n of aviation 

 which had baffled inventors for centuries: and it does 

 not intend to stand by in silence while a predatory 

 attempt is made on the just renown of the two 

 great geniuses who conceived the idea of the aero- 

 plane and worked it out with infinite patience and 

 self-effacement. The fact that these two men dis- 

 dained advertising their own achievement is all the 

 more reason why their countrymen should defend 

 their reputation. The e.xample they gave in the 



