Volume 1

Popular science / edited by Arthur Mee.

Date:
1912-1913
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Popular science / edited by Arthur Mee. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    learn that health is ease in mind and body too. We shall learn the wisdom of Solomon, that “a merry heart doeth good like a medicine, but a broken spirit drieth the bone.” We shall learn the wisdom of the dictionary, that healthy and happy and holy are three words with but one meaning. There is no wealth but health, and here is health for all, the plain rules of a game in which the loser is disease and the winner is a healthy man, a healthy woman, whole of body and whole of mind. GROUP 8 POWER Mart Finds Power Man has to-day a million times the power he had a thousand years ago, power won from Nature, snatched from wind and river and sun. He is taking hold of the invisible powers of the world. He is harnessing natural forces to do the work his own hand cannot do. Here is told the story of power from the beginning, with all the marvellous means by which man, when he finds a thing impossible, makes a machine to do it. He sends his messages through air; he hitches his engines to the rivers ; he floods the dark world with light drawn from beyond the ether. Man, in truth, is getting beyond his senses. Shakespeare put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes ; man can do it now in four. Man can photograph a thing he cannot see ; he can magnify sight and speech, and can store up sound. He can run like a deer, can fly like a bird, can swim like a fish ; but he can do more, for he can travel faster than a bird, by a power that he can stop with his finger, and he can cross the earth without losing touch of home. From mid-air and mid-ocean too, from down in the earth and down in the sea, he sends his message where he will. The time will come when man will lengthen life, but while that day waits he abolishes space and time and magnifies the work that he may do in his allotted span. GRQ,UP 9 INDUSTRY Man Uses Power The world’s workshop is the world itself, and the workers are the human race. What are they doing? Millions are making ships and guns ; millions are making and managing railways; millions are tilling the ground. Some are making a channel to join two oceans ; some are boring a hole through the Alps; some are throwing huge bridges across wide rivers ; some are stretching a tele graph wire across the desert. Some are digging up the old world ; some are laying the foundations of new Babylons on the site of old-world empires. Some are blasting- iron and making steel ; some are printing papers and