ed our Indians in the nil admarari line.

For all that, it is a strange thing to see what numbers of new things are
really old. There are many modern contrivances that are of as early date
as the first man, if not thousands of centuries older. Everybody knows
how all the arrangements of our telescopes and microscopes are
anticipated in the eye, and how our best musical instruments are
surpassed by the larynx. But there are some very odd things any
anatomist can tell, showing how our recent contrivances are anticipated
in the human body. In the alimentary canal are certain pointed eminences
called villi, and certain ridges called valvuloe conniventes. The makers
of heating apparatus have exactly reproduced the first in the "pot" of
their furnaces, and the second in many of the radiators to be seen in our
public buildings. The object in the body and the heating apparatus is
the same; to increase the extent of surface.--We mix hair with plaster
(as the Egyptians mixed straw with clay to make bricks) so that it shall
hold more firmly. But before man had any artificial dwelling the same
contrivance of mixing fibrous threads with a cohesive substance had been
employed in the jointed fabric of his own spinal column. India-rubber is
modern, but the yellow animal substance which is elastic like that, and
serves the same purpose in the animal economy which that serves in our
mechanical contrivances, is as old as the mammalia. The dome, the round
and the Gothic arch, the groined roof, the flying buttress, are all
familiar to those who have studied the bony frame of man. All forms of
the lever and all the principal kinds of hinges are to be met with in our
own frames. The valvular arrangements of the blood-vessels are
unapproached by any artificial apparatus, and the arrangements for
preventing friction are so perfect that two surfaces will play on each
other for fourscore years or more and never once trouble their owner by
catching or rubbing so as to be felt or heard.

But stranger than these repetitions are the coincidences one finds in the
manners and speech of antiquity and our own time. In the days when Flood
Ireson was drawn in the cart by the Maenads of Marblehead, that fishing
town had the name of nurturing a young population not over fond of
strangers. It used to be said that if an unknown landsman showed himself
in the streets, the boys would follow after him, crying, "Rock him! Rock
him! He's got a long-ta