something of the contrivances for warming
it, and I hope you understand a little about that!"

"Well," said Mr. Bagges, "breathing, I understand you to say, is the chief
source of animal heat, by occasioning the combination of carbon and
hydrogen with oxygen, in a sort of gentle combustion, throughout our
frame. The lungs and heart are an apparatus for generating heat, and
distributing it over the body by means of a kind of warming pipes, called
blood-vessels. Eh?--and the carbon and hydrogen we have in our systems we
get from our food. Now, you see, here is a slice of cake, and there is a
glass of wine--Eh?--now see whether you can get any carbon and oxygen out of
that."

The young philosopher, having finished his lecture, applied himself
immediately to the performance of the proposed experiment, which he
performed with cleverness and dispatch.

THE STEEL PEN. AN ILLUSTRATION OF CHEAPNESS. (FROM DICKENS'S HOUSEHOLD
WORDS.)

We remember (early remembrances are more durable than recent) an epithet
employed by Mary Wolstonecroft, which then seemed as happy as it was
original--"The _iron_ pen of Time." Had the vindicatress of the "Rights of
Women" lived in these days (fifty years later), when the iron pen is the
almost universal instrument of writing, she would have bestowed upon Time
a less common material for recording his doings.

While we are remembering, let us look back for a moment upon our earliest
school-days--the days of large text and round hand. Twenty urchins sit at a
long desk, each intent upon making his _copy_. A nicely mended pen has
been given to each. Our own labor goes on successfully, till, in
school-boy phrase, the pen begins to splutter. A bold effort must be made.
We leave the form, and timidly address the writing-master with--"Please,
sir, mend my pen." A slight frown subsides as he sees that the quill is
very bad--too soft or too hard--used to the stump. He dashes it away, and
snatching a feather from a bundle--a poor thin feather, such as green geese
drop on a common--shapes it into a pen. This mending and making process
occupies all his leisure--occupies, indeed, many of the minutes that ought
to be devoted to instruction. He has a perpetual battle to wage with his
bad quills. They are the meanest produce of the plucked goose.

And is this process still going on in the many thousand schools of our
land, where with all drawbacks of imperfect education, both as to numbers
educated