Look here!—­he said.  I keep oblivion always before me.—–­He pointed to a singularly perfect and beautiful trilobite which was lying on a pile of manuscripts.—–­Each time I fill a sheet of paper with what I am writing, I lay it beneath this relic of a dead world, and project my thought forward into eternity as far as this extinct crustacean carries it backward.  When my heart beats too lustily with vain hopes of being remembered, I press the cold fossil against it and it grows calm.  I touch my forehead with it, and its anxious furrows grow smooth.  Our world, too, with all its breathing life, is but a leaf to be folded with the other strata, and if I am only patient, by and by I shall be just as famous as imperious Caesar himself, embedded with me in a conglomerate.

He began reading:—­“There is no new thing under the sun,” said the Preacher.  He would not say so now, if he should come to life for a little while, and have his photograph taken, and go up in a balloon, and take a trip by railroad and a voyage by steamship, and get a message from General Grant by the cable, and see a man’s leg cut off without its hurting him.  If it did not take his breath away and lay him out as flat as the Queen of Sheba was knocked over by the splendors of his court, he must have rivalled our Indians in the nil admarari line.

For all that, it is a strange thing to see what numbers of new things are really old.  There are many modern contrivances that are of as early date as the first man, if not thousands of centuries older.  Everybody knows how all the arrangements of our telescopes and microscopes are anticipated in the eye, and how our best musical instruments are surpassed by the larynx.  But there are some very odd things any anatomist can tell, showing how our recent contrivances are anticipated in the human body.  In the alimentary canal are certain pointed eminences called villi, and certain ridges called valvuloe conniventes.  The makers of heating apparatus have exactly reproduced the first in the “pot” of their furnaces, and the second in many of the radiators to be seen in our public buildings.  The object in the body and the heating apparatus is the same; to increase the extent of surface.—­We mix hair with plaster (as the Egyptians mixed straw with clay to make bricks) so that it shall hold more firmly.  But before man had any artificial dwelling the same contrivance of mixing fibrous threads with a cohesive substance had been employed in the jointed fabric of his own spinal column.  India-rubber is modern, but the yellow animal substance which is elastic like that, and serves the same purpose in the animal economy which that serves in our mechanical contrivances, is as old as the mammalia.  The dome, the round and the Gothic arch, the groined roof, the flying buttress, are all familiar to those who have studied the bony frame of man.  All forms of the lever and all the principal kinds of hinges are to be met with in our own frames.  The valvular arrangements of the blood-vessels are unapproached by any artificial apparatus, and the arrangements for preventing friction are so perfect that two surfaces will play on each other for fourscore years or more and never once trouble their owner by catching or rubbing so as to be felt or heard.