of an inch, or of a second, can be measured, but even this approximation, although far closer than is ever practically necessary, is not accuracy.  In the statement of measurements there is no meaning in more than six significant figures, and only the most careful observations can be trusted so far.  The height of Mount Everest is given as 29,002 feet; but here the fifth figure is meaningless, the height of that mountain not being known so accurately that two feet more or less would be detected.  Similarly, the radius of the earth is sometimes given as 3963.295833 miles, whereas no observation can get nearer the truth than 3963.30 miles.

—­Mill:  The Realm of Nature. (Copyright, 1892, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.)

4.  The chief cause which made the fusion of the different elements of society so imperfect was the extreme difficulty which our ancestors found in passing from place to place.  Of all the inventions, the alphabet and the printing press alone excepted, those inventions which abridge distance have done most for the civilization of our species.  Every improvement of the means of locomotion benefits mankind morally and intellectually as well as materially, and not only facilitates the interchange of the various productions of nature and art, but tends to remove national and provincial prejudices, and to bind together all the branches of the great human family.  In the seventeenth century the inhabitants of London were for almost every practical purpose farther from Reading than they are now from Edinburgh, and farther from Edinburgh than they are now from Vienna.

—­Macaulay:  History of England.

5.  He touched New England at every point.  He was born a frontiersman.  He was bred a farmer.  He was a fisherman in the mountain brooks and off the shore.  He never forgot his origin, and he never was ashamed of it.  Amid all the care and honor of his great place here he was homesick for the company of his old neighbors and friends.  Whether he stood in Washington, the unchallenged prince and chief in the Senate, or in foreign lands, the kingliest man of his time in the presence of kings, his heart was in New England.  When the spring came, he heard far off the fife bird and the bobolink calling him to his New Hampshire mountains, or of the waves on the shore at Marshfield alluring him with a sweeter than siren’s voice to his home by the summer sea.

—­George F. Hoar:  Daniel Webster.

6.  Nor must I forget the suddenly changing seasons of the northern clime.  There is no long and lingering spring, unfolding leaf and blossom one by one; no long and lingering autumn, pompous with many-colored leaves and the glow of Indian summer.  But winter and summer are wonderful, and pass into each other.  The quail has hardly ceased piping in the corn when winter, from the folds of trailing clouds, sows broadcast over the land snow, icicles, and rattling hail.  The days wane apace.  Erelong the sun hardly rises above the horizon, or does not rise at all.  The moon and the stars shine through the day; only at noon they are pale and wan, and in the southern sky a red, fiery glow, as of a sunset, burns along the horizon and then goes out.  And pleasantly under the silver moon, and under the silent, solemn stars, ring the steel shoes of the skaters on the frozen sea, and voices, and the sound of bells.