Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 12, No. 30, September, 1873Various
Science
Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 12, No. 30, September, 1873
Various
Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Science -- Periodicals
I will do one side of the American department in the exhibition stern
justice. It commences with a long picture placed there by the Pork
Packers' Association of Cincinnati, descriptive of the processes which
millions of American hogs are subjected to while being converted into
pork. There are hogs going in long procession to be killed, and
going, too, in a determined sort of way, as if they knew it was their
business to be killed. Then come hogs killed, hogs scalded, hogs
scraped, hogs cut up into shoulders, hams, sides, jowls; hogs salted,
hogs smoked. Underneath this sketch are a number of unpainted buggy
and carriage wheels; next, a pile of pick-handles; not far off, a
little mound of grindstones; after the grindstones, a platoon of
clothes-wringers; next, a solitary iron wheel-barrow communing with a
patent fire-extinguisher; following these a crowd of green iron pumps,
with sewing-machines in full force. Such is a bit of the American
department.
It is the fashion here that every one should have a growl at the
general slimness and slovenliness of our department. Every one gives
our drooping eagle a kick. This is all wrong. We can't send our
greatest wonders and triumphs to Europe. There is neither room nor
opportunity in the building for showing off one of our political
torchlight processions, or a vigilance-committee hanging, or a Chicago
or Boston fire, or a steamboat blow-up, or a railway smash-up. Were
the present chief of the commission a man of originality and talent,
he might even now save the national reputation by bundling all the
pumps, churns, patent clothes-washers, wheel-barrows and pick-handles
out of doors, and converting one of the United States rooms into a
reservation for the Modocs, and the other into a corral for buffaloes
and grizzly bears. These, with a mustang poet or two from Oregon, a
few Hard-Shell Democrats, a live American daily paper, with a corps
of reporters trained to squeeze themselves through door-cracks
and key-holes, might retrieve the national honor, if shown up
realistically and artistically.
PRENTICE MULFORD.
GHOSTLY WARRIORS.
So strong a resemblance exists between a battle-scene of a mediaeval
Spanish poet and the culminating incidents of Lord Macaulay's _Battle
of the Lake Regillus_, as to justify somewhat extended citations. Of
the Spanish writer, Professor Longfellow says, in his note upon the
extract from the _Vida de San Millan_ given in the _Poets and Poetry
of Europe_, "Gonzalo de Berceo, the oldest of the Castilian poets
whose name has reached us, was born in 1198. He was a monk in the
monastery of Saint Millan, in Calahorra, and wrote poems on sacred
subjects in Castilian Alexandrines." According to the poem, the
Spaniards, while combating the Moors, were overcome by "a terror
of their foes," since "these were a numerous army, a little handful
those."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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