Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 23, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 January 1911 — NOT SAME OLD WORLD [ARTICLE]

NOT SAME OLD WORLD

SCIENTISTS CHANGE THINGB IN LABT HALF CENTURY. ■ iy&n^ • - ' Vw Scarcely a Day Pasees but What Set* ence Takes a Pot Shot at Some Picturesque Phase of Our Earlier Lives. It is queer, but seemingly science knocks all the picturesque out dtfjßM and if science were in a shooting gallery and the picturesque were a, target, the bell would never stop ringing. The old oaken bucket has given place to the galvanized iron vessel. The gourd dipper is now a tin cup with a handle soldered on. The moss-grown well curb is no more, and. over the well is a solid slab of cement, while in a bright red building a sizzling, thumping gasoline engine is industriously pumping the cool water into an elevated metal tank on stilts. No more the ploughman plods his weary way from the field. He rides back on the plough which now has wheels. The country doctor now has an automobile and Dobbin has been madql into sausage. f And in the city It’s worse. The scissor grinder used to. have a contraption made of wheels and wood and. leather and stood up and ground t$H! things. Now he has. an automobile with a scissor grinder attached, and the auto power runs the thing. ' The shoemaker used to squat on a polished leather seat in his littered shop and cobble shoes while you sat with your cold feet on a newspaper. Nbw you go into a miniature shoe factory where they can make you a pair of shoes in the time it took him to put a heeLon, and the buzz of machinery is only broken by the rattle of the cash register. Where merchants used to put a gun or a mortar and pestle or something above their shops to show what they sold, the merchants now have, reoocurring, alternating, hit-or-miss, come-and-go sort of electric signs that make you blind to gaze upon. y No more the seller of feather dusters and whisk brooms strolls about the streets with weird cries. You get these things at the store and twentyone seconds later a motorcycle youth delivers them. No more the vendor of apples cries fiercely on the streets. Apples arq now sold at a nickel apiece at the fruit stands, and the fruit has to be polished dally to keep It bright. The hydrant has displaced the town pump; the barber shop is now a place where they do manicuring and give baths, no longer a lounging place for gossips. It’s all been changed by science, and scarcely a day passes that science doesn’t take a pot shot at some picturesque phase of our earlier lives and knocks the feathers out of Its tail, for there’s no room on this earth for both the scientific and the picturesque, and something had to go.