Amazing Stories, Vol. 3, No. 2 — page 37: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

132 \ “That, now I believe,” said the king, “becatise I have ' read something of the kind before in a book.” ““We passed immediately beneath this continent (swimming in between the legs of the cow) and, after some hours, found ourselves in a wonderful country indeed, which, I was informed by the man-anima., was his own native land, inhabited by things of his own species. This elevated the man-animal very much in my esteem; and in fact, I now began to feel ashamed of the contemptuous familiarity with which I had treated him; for I found that the man-animals in gen- eral were a nation of the most powerful magicians, who lived with worms in their brain,?° which, no doubt, served to stimulate them, by their painful writhings and wrigglings, to the most miraculous efforts of imagination.’ ” “Nonsense!” said the king. “Among the magicians were domesticated several animals of very singular kinds; for example, there was a huge horse whose bones were iron and whose blood was boiling water. In place of corn, he had black stones for his usual food; and yet, in spite of so hard a diet, he was so strong and swift that he would drag a load more weighty than the grandest temple in this city, at a rate surpassing that of the flight of most birds. ” 74 “Twattle!” said the king. ““T saw, also, among these people a hen without feathers, but bigger than a camel; instead of flesh and bone she had iron and brick; her blood, like that of the - horse (to whom, in fact, she was nearly related), was boiling water; and like him she ate nothing but wood or black stones. This hen brought forth, very fre- quently, a hundred chickens in the day ; and, after birth, they took up their residence for several weeks within the stomach of their mother.’ ”’ *? “Fal lal!” said the king. “One of this nation of mighty conjurors created a man out of brass and wood, and leather, and endowed him with such ingenuity that he would have beaten at chess all the race of mankind, with the exception of the great Caliph, Haroun Alraschid.** Another of these magi constructed (of like material) a creature that put to shame even the genius of him who made it; for so great were its reasoning powers that, in a second, it per- formed calculations of so vast an extent that they would have required the united labor of fifty thousand fleshy men for a year.** But a still more wonderful conjuror fashioned for himself a mighty thing that was neither man nor beast, but which had brains of lead, intermixed with a black matter like pitch, and fingers that it em- ployed with such incredible speed and dexterity that it would have had no trouble in writing out twenty thou- gand copies of the Koran in an hour; and this was so exquisite a precision, that in all the copies there should not be found one to vary from another by the breadth AMAZING STORIES of the finest hair. This thing was of prodigious strength, so that it erected or overthrew the mightiest empires at a breath; but its powers were exercised equally for evil and for good.’” “Ridiculous !” said the king. ““Among this nation of necromancers there was also one who had in his veiris the blood of the salamanders ; for he made no scruple of sitting down to smoke his chibouc in a ted-hot oven until his dinner was thor- oughly roasted upon its floor.*® Another had the faculty of converting the common metals into gold, without even looking at them during the process.2° An- other had such a delicacy of touch that he made a wire so fine as to be invisible.*7 Another had such quickness of perception that he counted all the separate motions of an elastic body, while it was springing backward and forward at the rate of nine hundred millions of times in a second.’ ” 28 “Absurd!” said the king. “Another of these magicians, by means of a fluid that nobody éver yet saw, could make the corpses of his friends brandish their arms, kick out their legs, fight, or even get up and dance at his will.*® Another had culti- vated his voice to so great an extent that he could have made himself heard from one end of the earth to the other.°° Another had so long an arm that he could sit down in Damascus and indite a letter at Bagdad—or, indeed, at any distance whatsoever. Another com- _manded the lightning to come down to him out of the heavens, and it came at his call; and served him for a plaything when it came. Another took two loud sounds and out of them made a silence. Another constructed a deep darkness out of two brilliant lights.?2 Another made ice in a red-hot furnace.*? Another directed the * Chabert, and since him, a hundred others. ® The Electrotype. * Wollaston made of platinum for the field of views in a tele- scope a wire one eighteen-thousand part of an inch in thickness. It could be seen only by means of the microscope, * Newton demonstrated that the retina, beneath the influence of the violet ray of the spectrum, vibrated 900,000,000 of times in a second. ” The Voltaic pile. ® The Electro Telegraph transmits intelligence instantaneously —at least so far as regards any distance upon the earth. * The Electro Telegraph Printing Apparatus, ®Common experiments in Natural Philosophy. If two ted rays from two luminous points be admitted into a dark chamber so as to fall on a white surface, and differ in their length by .0000258 of an inch, their intensity is doubled. So also if the difference in length be any whole number multiplied of that fraction. A multiple by 2%, 314, &c., gives an intensity equal _ fo one-ray only; but.a multiple by 2%, 3%, &c., gives the result ““The Entozoa, or intestinal worms, have repeatedly been observed in the muscles, and in the cerebral substance of men.” —See Wryatt’s Physiology, p. 143. oe : : *On the Great Western Railway, between London and Exe- ter, a speed of 71 miles per hour has been attained, A train — weighing 90 tons was whirled from Paddington to Didcot (53 miles), in 51 mitutes, “The Eccalobeion. (Now called Incubator.) ™ Maelze’s Automaton Chess-player, . ™ Babbage’s Calculating Machine. _ of total darkness. In violet rays similar effects arise when the difference in length is 0.000157 of an inch; and with all other tays the results are the same—the difference varying with a a uniform increase from the violet to the red. oe eR BOnE experiments in respect to sound produce analogous results. : = ent * Placé a platinum crucible over a spirit lamp, and keep it at a red heat; pour in some sulphurous acid, which, though the tost volatile of bodies at a common temperature, will be found — to become completely fixed in a hot crucible, and not a drop evaporates—being surrounded by. an atmosphere of its own, ~ it does not, in fact, touch the sides. A few drops of water are now introduced, when the acid immediately coming in contact with the heated sides of the crucible, 1 flies off in sul- phurous acid vapor, and so rapid is its progress, that the caloric of the water passes off with it, which falls a lump of ice to the ‘bottom; by taking advantage of the moment ‘before it is allowed to re-melt, it may ‘be turned out a lump of ice from a red-hot vessel, - comlichooks.corn