Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 155, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 June 1910 — WORLD OF FALSE IDEAS [ARTICLE]

WORLD OF FALSE IDEAS

Some Peculiar Beliefs That Have Been Proved Wrong as the Years Go By. THE INACCURACIES OF HISTORY. Fallacies Regarding Weather, Cata, Moths, Pendulums, Steam and Falling Now Exploded. •» The world Is full of fallacies, entirely apart from the great mass of superstitions which In themselves form a class, a writer In the New York Evening Post says. A little knowledge Is a dangerous thing, and a superficial knowledge of the science will cause people to believe that the earth is cookie-shaped, or that orchards live on air, or that salamanders can really live In fire. Other weird beliefs run a parallel course with the materia medica; for instance, that whooping cough can be cured by letting a piebald horse breathe on the child, or that measles can be cured by taking the child through three parishes In a day. Weather is the subject Y»f quantities of absurd theories, among which some people rank first the Idea that the government forecasters can predict it. There Is a belief that mild winters follow a mild December. There were those firings of cannons and exploding aerial bombs some years ago to make rain fall on the thirsty farm lands. We are even told now that our old pets, the equinoctial storms, are but creatures of the Imagination. History abounds In things which never happened. Wellington never said, “Up, guards, and at them!” at the battle of Waterloo. Dick vvnittlngton never came to London with a domestic animal called a cat. William Tell never shot the apple off his son’s head and Horatius never defended the bridge. The old story about Lady Godlva has been absolutely disproved. Cinderella Is said to have worn glass slippers to the famous hall at which she made her reputation. In the old Eastern version, she wore fur slippers. That cats suck the breath out of sleeping babies Is an old absurdity that dies hard. The human race Is intelligent enough In this day and generation to understand electric lights and wireless, aeroplanes and automobiles; but you still occasionally see in the newspapers accounts of cats who have killed babies by sucking their breath. This is one way of saying that the cat, liking a warm place to lie. has jumped into the baby’s bed and suffocated the occupant by lying on it. The average little baby is less in weight than the average cat, and is scarcely capable of driving a cat away. The pendulum does not make the clock go. It merely makes it go evenly. Steam Is invisible. What we see emerging from locomotives and the tops of tall buildings Is steam which has begun to turn back Into water. Nails and teeth of animals are nos poisonous themselves. A scratch or bite from dog or cat may prove so, but only because some Impurity or germ has been deposited in the ugly wound which results. When a serpent bites he discharges a special poishn which is secreted from glands. Many people think that a soft-boiled .egg which has been allowed to cool cannot be made hard by a second boiling. This Is not true. Every time a workman falls from a forty-story building there are people who say: “Well, he probably didn’t feel it when he struck.” There is little or no basis for this belief that a person is dead or unconscious at the end of a lofig fall. Our surviving jumpers from Brooklyn bridge prove this, and that a person retains consciousness is shown by the case of the English hoy who fell down a pit some 250 feet deep and shouted “Below!” three times on the way down. One theory is that a person falling would not be able to breathe: but a train at sixty miles an hour Is moving faster than one would move in falling 100 or so feet, and no one pretends that one would die of suffocation if he puts his head out of the train wlildow. The old tradition that a drowning person rises three times before he goes down sounds well In Carnegie medal stories, but Is not true. A person rises so many times'as he can get to the surface —which may be once or a hundred times —and he drowns when he is so full of water that he cannot breathe.