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Those who, like Arago, declare that the word "impossible" does not exist, except in the higher mathematics, and those who look hopefully to the future instead of resting content with the past, will join in applauding the spirit which dictated the manifesto of aerial locomotion to the founder of the association which we are about to describe.
But when I say that the eye "makes use of" light, I do not merely mean that the eye is capable of seeing; I allude to the very precise relations that exist between this organ and the apparatus of locomotion. The retina of vertebrates is prolonged in an optic nerve, which, again, is continued by cerebral centres connected with motor mechanisms.
The accompanying illustration is from a drawing of a skeleton in the Warren Museum in Boston. The subject was an Indian, twenty-one years of age, one of the Six Nations. His mode of locomotion was by a large wooden bowl, in which he sat and moved forward by advancing first one side of the bowl and then the other, by means of his hands.
When it is said that as early as Monday he received one of those notes, and that for an hour thereafter he had very indefinite ideas as to which end of the human figure was intended for the purposes of locomotion, it will be understood that both parties to the compact were carrying out their agreement with praiseworthy faithfulness.
We have five fingers and five toes, though only four limbs. Locomotion is mechanical and even numbers serve better than odd. Hence the six-legged insects. In the inorganic world things attain a stable equilibrium, but in the living world the equilibrium is never stable. Things are not stereotyped, hence the danger of dogmatizing about living things. Growing Nature will not be driven into a corner.
They are not to be had in the country at any price, water, gas, fuel, food, attendance, amusement, locomotion in all weathers; but such a moderate measure of them as a city-bred family cannot live without involves so great an expense, that the expected economy of life in the country to those not actually brought up there turns out a delusion.
During the Middle Ages those seraphic doctors of theology, who gravely argued how many angels could dance on the point of a needle, speculated also on the serpent's method of locomotion before the "fall." Some thought the animal had legs, some that it undulated gracefully on its back, and others that it hopped about on its tail.
In a little while no one thought anything of crossing an abyss on a wire, and the mono-rail was superseding the tram-lines, railways: and indeed every form of track for mechanical locomotion.
Chamier once asked him, what he meant by slow, the last word in the first line of The Traveller, "Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow." Did he mean tardiness of locomotion? Goldsmith, who would say something without consideration, answered, "Yes." I was sitting by, and said, "No, Sir; you do not mean tardiness of locomotion; you mean, that sluggishness of mind which comes upon a man in solitude."
The growth of our great cities, the rapid populating of America, the entry of China into the field of European politics are, for example, quite obviously and directly consequences of new methods of locomotion.
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