220 SCIENTIFIC ILLUSTRATIONS [Men 



fact is that memory often grips and appropriates quite mechani- 

 cally. The magpie appropriates the silver spoon, carries off the 

 gold pencil, and numbers of other articles, without knowing 

 what they are or what to do with them, and stores them carefully 

 away. Like the magpie, the memory is a kleptomaniac. It 

 cannot restrain itself from snatching at and stealing away all 

 sorts of things. Hence the importance of keeping away from 

 thoughts and scenes which it is undesirable for memory to 

 accumulate. The magpie does not turn his medley of stores to 

 much account. The memory does. It is constantly meddling 

 with them, and they are all turned to either a good or evil 

 purpose. And they endure for ever. G. a 



Mental Lights. 



Aldebaran was once the grandest star of the firmament, and 

 Sirius had a companion star once the brightest in heaven, and 

 now one of the feeblest. Because they are now dim to us, are 

 we to conclude that they are going out and becoming nought 1 

 The stars, says Mr. E. S. Dallas, are overhead, though in the 

 blaze of day they are unseen ; they are not only overhead, but 

 also all their influences are unchanged. So there is knowledge 

 active within us of which we see nothing, know nothing, think 

 nothing. Thus in the sequence of thought, the mind, busied 

 with the first link in a chain of ideas, may dart to the third or 

 the fourth, the intermediate links being utterly unknown to it. 

 But they are there, and there in force. G. s. 



The Mental Fertilisers of Society. 



Mountains act as loadstones to the clouds, and draw down 

 from them the fertilising rain. A mountain-range often deter- 

 mines whether a country is to be a garden or a desert, and points 

 out the place where the rain-bearing winds are to yield up their 

 treasures. Mountains drink the waters of the rain of heaven. 

 They are the great watersheds of the earth. On their tops the 

 river-systems of the world are born, and the tiny rills thence 

 first started on their way soon coalesce into streams, and then 

 into rivers, to be poured back eventually into the sea. They are 



