TWO:"Is that so? Well, it is not very clear! And that little girl?"Among the scientific and literary men who were not pledged to any particular school, we find the elder Pliny rejecting the belief in immortality, not only as irrational but235 as the reverse of consolatory. It robs us, he declares, of Natures most especial boon, which is death, and doubles the pangs of dissolution by the prospect of continued existence elsewhere.361 Quintilian leaves the question undecided;362 Tacitus expresses himself doubtfully;363 and Galen, whose great physiological knowledge enabled him to see how fallacious were Platos arguments, while his philosophical training equally separated him from the materialists, also refuses to pronounce in favour of either side.364 What Juvenal thought is uncertain; but, from his general tone, we may conjecture that he leant to the negative side.365
TWO:The life of George Stephenson proves that notwithstanding the novelty and great importance of his improvements in steam transit, he did not "discover" these improvements. He did not discover that a floating embankment would carry a railway across Chat Moss, neither did he discover that the friction between the wheels of a locomotive and the rails would enable a train to be drawn by tractive power alone. Everything connected with his novel history shows that all of his improvements were founded upon a method of reasoning from principles and generally inductively. To say that he "discovered" our railway system, according to the ordinary construction of the term, would be to detract from his hard and well-earned reputation, and place him among a class of fortunate schemers, who can claim no place in the history of legitimate engineering.In working to regular scales, such as one-half, one-eighth, or one-sixteenth size, a good plan is to use a common rule, instead of a graduated scale. There is nothing more convenient for a mechanical draughtsman than to be able to readily resolve dimensions into various scales, and the use of a common rule for fractional scales trains the mind, so that computations come naturally, and after a time almost without effort. A plain T square, with a parallel blade fastened on the side of the head, [80] but not imbedded into it, is the best; in this way set squares can pass over the head of a T square in working at the edges of the drawing. It is strange that a draughting square should ever have been made in any other manner than this, and still more strange, that people will use squares that do not allow the set squares to pass over the heads and come near to the edge of the board.












