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-tailed coat on!"

Now if one opens the Odyssey, he will find that the Ph