If it did not take his breath away and lay him out as flat
as the Queen of Sheba was knocked over by the splendors of his court, he
must have rivalled 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.
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