Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 20, September, 1877.Various
History
Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 20, September, 1877.
Various
Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Science -- Periodicals
This great change extinguishes a tribe of agents as numerous and
troublesome as any that roams the Upper Missouri or the Lower Colorado.
As numerous, did we say? It outnumbered all the septs of the Sioux--did
more travelling and peopled more lodges. It had its peculiar literature
and its peculiar vehicles. We have known a single contract made with a
Western carriage-factory for five hundred sewing-machine wagons, for the
use of one out of the fifteen or twenty companies. All these gay and
jaunty equipages go into quod, like the tumbrils and ambulances left
over in 1865, and with them, into yet more helpless disuse, a mass of
literature, written, printed and oral, great beyond computation. It is a
fossil industry whereof even the bones have suddenly perished. To its
credit, be it said, it died game, struggling to the last, its
battlefield the lobbies of Congress and the halls of the Patent Office.
Gold and greenbacks were shed like water, but not much blood save the
blood of the grape. All was in vain. The little needle, with an eye near
the point, the sharp steel weapon of Howe that so long held at bay all
assailants, puzzled a succession of judges of first and second instance,
original and appellate, and enriched a generation of attorneys, was
forced finally to succumb. All the world and his wife--his wife
especially--may make and use a needle with any style or position of hole
without paying a cent of royalty for the inestimable privilege. That
historic implement has the largest liberty, and may disport itself in an
infinity of scrolls and intricacies over the raiment of male and female.
The befrogged officer is no longer limited in the arabesques of braid
and tinsel that make gay his manly breast. He commands all the resources
of Snip's imagination, and whirligigs beyond what hath entered the mind
of man to conceive will shortly meander over the cerulean expanse.
KATERFELTO IN REPOSE.
Is there not a lull in the quack-medicine business? Its advertisements
do not appear to us to shine with the brilliancy of old. Those
astonishing portraits of Old Doctor So-and-So, and the gorgeous
perspective view of the interior of Professor Snooks's laboratory, all
alive with forty 'prentice-power pill-machines and tincture-vats like
the pools of a swimming academy, have ceased to illustrate the condition
of modern art and medicine.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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