Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 January 1910 — IF THEY HAD ONLY KNOWN. [ARTICLE]

IF THEY HAD ONLY KNOWN.

What Present Appliance* Would Have Effected In Ancient Daya. How few of us are sufficiently grateful for the times in which we liveThink of all the material and mechanical advantages we enjoy over the ancients, who, with all their boasted civilization, their arts and sciences, went from their cradle to their grave utterly ignorant of clocks, pocket handkerchiefs, trousers and bonnets, or even those demi-ancients, our greatgrandfathers, who would have regarded a barometer as an instrument of Beelzebub! How differently history might have been written if Julius Caesar had Bnatched a couple of Colt’s double-bar-reled revolvers from his tunic and shot Cafca and his fellow conspirators dead on the spot! says E. S. Valentine, in the Strand. What a tremendous advantage it would have given Xenophon and the retreating 10,000 to have seized a line of railway from Persia to the Hellespont, with fast steamers to Attica and Laconia! The people of Pericles’ day were not wholly desti tuts of ingenious appliances for use and amusement, but, for some reason or other which posterity cannot exactly' explain, the Athenian populace knew not the delectable joys of the flip-flap, and the charms of the scenic railway were to them a closed book. Yet we can picture the scene which would have astonished Aechylus and Sophocles, the vast Athenian multitude deserting the fields and groves to flock about the latest Bensatlon, a mighty engine of balance brought into Hellas by the western magician, Imreus Klralfos. What an excellent subject for satire this adventure of the Athenians would furnish later to Aristophanes, and how rude delineations of the apparatus would delight modern scholars and Invite comparisons with the screw of Archimedes!