USA > Pennsylvania > Mifflin County > History of Mifflin County : its physical peculiarities, soil, climate, &c. ; including an early sketch of the state of Pennsylvania Volume I > Part 36
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These acenmulations are sometimes several hundred yards in length and after decomposing for ages are from three to nine feet thick. We must admit that these primitive people may have ac- complished and undoubtedly did accomplish many achievements of skill and intelligence of which it is now impossible to discover any record. Their food, like their dwellings, was at first supplied spon- taneously by nature, but at a future period man seems to have learned the art of cultivating and producing grain and vegetables. In some of the earthen pots disinterred in Switzerland have been found winter stores of fruits and cereals.
Among them were beautiful specimens of wheat, barley, oats, peas and acorns. At this period these people must have cultivated the ground and raised eattle. The discoveries of millstones, with pestles of granite and freestone, shows that they knew how to grind their grain. The use of fire was known and upon this they roasted their meat. They ate the marrow and the brains of the animals they killed, for we find the bones split for the purpose of obtaining these substanees. Their garments were sewed together by the use of needles and awls of which proofs have also been found. The man of this period had some artistic taste as is proved by his work- manship displayed upon the bone and horn handles of many of his
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tools, in the finish of his lance and his arrow heads, knives and dag- gers, in the fashion of his pottery and in beads formed of pebbles, of corals and the teeth of animals. The drawings of animals are very beautifully executed on bones and slate. For the facts above detailed we are indebted to the researches of Voght, M. M. Lartett, and Garrigow, of Europe.
These people evidently possessed a marked predisposition to art. The rude hunter, wearied in the chase, amused himself in reproduc- ing on ivory and stone the forms that had excited his interest and upon which he depended for subsistence and for service.
Primeval man was endowed with a religious nature. He formed numerous utensils consecrated to the ceremonies of religion. He buried his dead in grottoes closed with slabs as the Jews continue to do at a later day.
The recumbent positions of many of the skeletons shows that, like the dead of the ancient Peruvians in South America, that they were entombed with an observance of religious rites.
Like the American Indian, he provided his deceased friend with the food and arms to supply his necessities while on his journey to another world.
These are facts of extreme significance as tending to show that the religious consciousness universal in our day, was also an en- dowment of the earliest and uninstructed type of man.
The man of the stone age was not as some have asserted, a per- fected monkey. He had the structure of a man; was capable of speech ; he became improved and educated by experience, a charac- teristic of intelligence ; he admired beauty, he manifested a per- ception of the ideal ; his thoughts strayed forward into another world, and with his other religious sentiments he felt a sense of superintending intelligence and a moral governor. It may be asked does this unwritten history of the race reach back to an antiquity incompatible with the prevalent views of the age of man. Here, as elsewhere, the enemies of revelation have sought materials for the use of unbelievers, but have songht in vain. There is more in the history of primeval man in conformity to the scriptures than we might hope to meet. It is not claimed that man lived before the glacial period, and the evidences of his cotemporaneous¿existence with the reign of ice is shown to be fallaceous.
Man had no place till after the reign of ice, and\ the best evi- dences go to prove the oldest human remains ever found to be be- tween five and six thousand years old.
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The fact is, we came ourselves upon the earth in time to witness the retreat of the glaciers. ' They still linger in the valley of the Alps, and along the northern shores of Europe and Asia, while the disappearance of animals cotemporary with man, is still continuing.
The great auk of the Arctic regions, has not been seen for half a century, and every one must be convinced that the beaver, the elk, the panther and the buffalo of North America, are approaching extinction by rapid and perceptible steps. The fact is, we are not so far out of the dust, the chaos and barbarism of antiquity as sup- posed. The very beginning of our race is still in sight. Geological events which we had imagined to be located far back in the history of things, are found to have transpired at our very doors. The vast changes that have transpired on the coast of China, the shores of the Mediterranean and other parts of the world, since man has been a beholder of them, and of geological history, seems to carry us back into the midst of grand events which we have so solemnly and wonderingly contemplated from our seeming dis- tance.
These geological intervals after all, are appreciably finite. This discovery affords a sensible relief to the mind so long oppressed by the contemplation of cyeles which lose themselves inthe haze of eternity.
One farther thought crowds itself into company of these reflec- tions. It is the thought of the growing perfection and exultation of our race. How it has struggled upward through many ages from the companionship of beasts, from the clothing of skins and bark, houses in caves, implements of flint, a vague consciousness of a superior being through all the grades of pupilage, all the degrees of civilization, from all the heights of moral and mental exaltation up to man as he is now. Whan a picture of progress is here ? How abject once, how exalted now? Is not man approaching nearer to God? How vastly less of the brute, how infinitely more of the spiritual ?
Once he contented himself to capture prey sufficient for food, as the bear and the tiger did in whose company he lived. But, oh ! how unconscious of his powers. He held, even then, that undevel- oped spark of divinity which the bear and the tiger had not, and he has risen, while they grovel on the plane from which they spring. From age to age he has learned to commune more and more with the unseen, the ideal, the good, and the true.
He has made achievements which were even once beyond his
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dreams. Steam and electricity, what marvels do they not summon into the human mind. What does a retrospect of fifty years dis- close? And is not man yet on the march of improvement ? What does a forward glance of fifty years unfold to the imagination ? There is nothing impossible among the works of God. It remains for us to penetrate the world of invisible things. We have already sundry rumors and pretenses. Shadows cast before perhaps, but as yet unsatisfactory and uniutelligable and unreduced to a philos- ophy. To fetter the human soul with assumed impossibilities is impiety. The bird which would soar, first looks upward. The soul never attains that which it did not strive for. With reference to the perfectability and exultation of the intellectual and moral nature of man, let no one say " impossible."
Man seems to have improved by the hints that nature has from time to time dropped along his pathway. Nature seems intention- ally to have done this that he may follow the beckonings of his thoughts. Not only were these germs of thought planted from time to time during the whole progress of the past creation, but man is the only creature capable of responding to this stimuli to mental activity, and is in itself the highest grade of mental en- dowment. It is an identity with that infinite intelligence whose · presence and supremacy is recognized throughout the universe. Man was the consummation of God's works. While these thoughts describe man, they exclude the thought of a successive being. The beneficient provisions of the earth's crust not only prophesied man, but they reach their finality in man.
It was only for human uses that coal was treasured in the recesses of the earth. It was for human uses alone, that these mountains lifted up their burdens of iron; for human uses alone that geology elaborated and distributed the soil. It was only for man's uses that the forests have yielded their abundant supplies of timber and fuel, and for him the edible and medicinal vegetables were pro- vided. For man the nature of the domestic animals were moulded and their domestic attachments are directed to no other being. Man stands at the focus of all the conceptions embodied in past history ..
We are as little authorized to allow that the course of develop- ment is destined to advance beyond him, as to deny that it has furnished intimations in all ages that it was destined to reach him. Man holds his supremacy through his intellect. Brutes dominate by the physical force belonging to matter, Man through the im- material forces which are the attributes of diety. Man is the first
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being in all the history of the world that could contemplate crea- tion. Man was the first capable of comtemplating the Deity.
In these exalted endowments not only does he excel the brutes, but he excels them in so vast a degree as to confirm the belief that the gradations in animal existence has been concluded, and nature- has reached a full pause.
Man stands in contact with God. A further approximation is impossible. He must be the limit, as he is the existing culmination of organic life. Man has unlimited geographical range over the earth. He overleaps all barriers ; climates, mountains, oceans, deserts, form no impediment to his migration. He has literally extended over the whole earth, and fulfilled the command to take possession-to use and enjoy it. The religious tenets of different ages and nations are instructive. Aristotle alone of all the ancient philosophers maintained the eternity of matter and of the universe in the existing order. He confesses a pride in this, since the doc- trine he claims is at varience with the universal beliefs of antiquity. Cicero, who intermeddled with all learning, assures us that the memory of mighty deeds cannot be eternal, since conflagrations and deluges obliterate all record of human achievements. The Druids secured the world an immortality only through successive periods of fire and water.
The Persians represent their god fire as the final avenger of the sins of men and the destroyer of the world. Among the Arabians and Indians the story of the Phoenix is an allegory of the earth. This bird of fable no sooner crumbles to ashes than he is renewed again, in more than pristine beauty. They have a similar fable of the eagle, who soared so near the sun as to renew his youth. Allu- sion seems to be made to this myth in the Psalms, where David says, " Thy youth is renewed like the eagles," a passage which the Chaldee paraphrase renders, " Thou shalt renew thy youth like the eagle in the world to come." The Aztec conception of the origin of man is noble, and approximates nearer to the Jewish Scriptures than either Egyptian or Hindoo. The following extracts are exact translations from the "National book of the Quiches of Guata- mala," and are marvelously conformable to the story of the earth as given by geology :
" There was not yet a single man-not an animal-neither birds, nor fishes, nor crabs, nor wood, nor stone, nor ravines, nor herbs, nor forests-only the sky existed. The face of the land was not seen-there was only the silent sea and the sky. There was not
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yet a body, naught to attach itself to another, naught that balanced itself, naught that made a sound in the air or sky.
" There was nothing that stood upright ; naught there was but the peaceful sea-the sea, silent and solitary within its limits, for there was nothing that was. Those who fecundate and those who give being are upon the waters like a growing light. While they consulted the day broke, and, at the moment of dawn, man ap- peared. Thus they consulted while the earth grew. Thus, verily, took place the creation as the earth came into being. 'EARTH,' they said, 'and the earth existed. Like a fog, like a cloud, was its formation. As huge fishes rise in the water, so rose the mountains, and in a moment the high mountains existed.' 'Hear, now, when it was first thought of man, and of what man should be formed. At that time spoke He who gives light and He who gives form- the Maker and Moulder, named Tepen. The day draws near, the work is done; the supporter, the servant, is ennobled. He is the son of light, the child of whiteness; man is honored, the race of man is on the earth. So they spoke. Immediately they begun to speak of making our first mother and our first father. Only of yel- low corn and of white corn were their flesh and the substance of the arms and legs of man. They were simply called beings, formed and fashioned ; they had neither mother nor father; we call them simply men. Woman did not bring them forth, nor were they born of the Builder and Moulder, of Him who fecundates and of Him who gives being. But it was a miracle, an enchantment, worked by the Maker and Moulder, by Him who fecundates and Him who gives being. Thought was in them ; they saw, they looked around, ' their vision took in all things, they pierced the world, they cast their eyes from the sky to the earth.' 'Then they were asked by the Builder and Moulder, ' What think ye of your being ? See ye not ? Understand ye not? Your language, your limbs, are they not good? Look around beneath the heavens, see ye not the moun- tains and plains ?'
"Then they looked and saw all that there was beneath the heavens. And they gave thanks to the Maker and Moulder, saying, 'Truly, twice and three times thanks. We have being, we have a mouth, a face, we speak, we understand, we think, we walk, we feel, we know that which is far and that which is near.
"' All great things and small on the earth and in the sky we do see. Thanks to thee, O Maker, O Moulder, that we have been
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created, that we have our being. O our Grandmother, O our Grand- father.' "
We cannot but regard these sentiments, these reveries of unin- spired and uninstructed intellect of man feeling after the mystery of his origin and the origin of created things, as equaling in sub- limity the contemplations-wisest contemplation-of the ancient philosophers groping by the dim light of reason for an outlook into the future of the soul.
The Muscle of Mifflin County.
The various towns of Mifflin county have a large number of me- chanics and artisans in all the various departments of the industries usually followed in these inland towns. Carpenters, machinists, blacksmiths, shoemakers, iron workers, miners, tailors, painters, jewelers, printers, tinners, &c., &c., &c., that are equalled by few and excelled by none.
Strangers have remarked to the writer in regard to some of our mechanics, whose abilities they had tested, that they regarded them as very superior, indeed. It is ever our pleasure to give honor to whom honor is due, and we hold it as a fundamental principle, in a Democratic form of government, that the masses, the man who earns his bread by the sweat of liis brow, either in common or skilled labor, is the bulwark and stay, the anchor and safety of the institutions of our country.
Hence the value of our free school system, where the property is taxed for the education of the poor man's children, who are to be the future rulers of our country. With rare exceptions, the best minds in our country have sprung from the laboring classes and been only educated in our common schools, but more of this under the head of education. The first settlers of this county were of Irish and Scotch-Irish descent, and of that peculiar mental and physical development characteristic of these nationalities, and the entire United States is indebted to those older countries of Europe for a part of the inhabitants thereof. To Germany for a rare develop- ment of stability and muscle, industry and perseverance, but to the Emerald Isle and the descendants thereof for both quantity and quality of the brains and the business energies of her people.
Irish wit has become proverbial the world over. The energies and the ambition of the Celtic race are as proverbial as their wit. It is no rare thing to find a railroad or street laborer a man of edu- cation and various attainments. We have always sympathized
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with the man who lost the following effusion, enclosing a lock of tangled hair:
"Och Jndy, me darlint, Here's a lock of me hair, And if there's a snarl in it, Sure I don't care, Anyhow; For now I'm going off For to work on the track. Yon may take it and keep it Until I get back, If ye like."
The Irishman who awoke in an unfinished dream has also to be pitied. He dreamed that Saint Patrick called on him and he was bonored. Saint Patrick asked him, " would he drink something ?" He replied, " would a duck swim ?" St. Patrick asked him, "would he have it cold, or hot ? " " Hot, to be sure," he replied. "St. Patrick went below for hot water, and before he returned I woke up, and now its troubling me that I did not take it cold." The Irish people and their descendants, more readily than any other nation- ality, became assimilated with the institutions of our country, the country of their adoption, and became attached to those institu- tions and our government, and to them and their descendants, is this country indebted for some of the best minds in the army and navy, the halls of legislation and the pulpit. The following we quote as expressive of his feelings on leaving his home. It tells its own story :
"I have just left Donegal, So I thought I'de give a call ; It's a thing that becomes an honest neighbor ; For I'm going across the sea, Bound for America, Where I'm told a man is paid for his labor. There I'll see O'Connor, And the boys I knew at home ;
I have danced with them into the morning, Bnt wherever I may roam, I will ever think of home,
For old Ireland was the country I was born in. Then strike np the band, In praise of Paddy's land, Although I may leave her in the morning."
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The Shoemaker.
Long years ago, fifty and more, the itinerant school teacher and the itinerant shoemaker were the important personages of every community. Boot and shoe stores were then unknown in these valleys. On the approach of the frosts of autumn, the traveling itin- erant shoemaker now closes his summer vacation and begins his annual round. Parents and children in almost every family, must now be shod, all round, by the man who will lodge and board in the family, until his mission is completed. In his homely pack he carries all the tools demanded for the practice of his art, and the farmer whom he serves, furnishes him a warm room and the bench whereon he plies his avocation from day to day, until his work is done. At a very early period the thread he used, was manufactured by the family, preparatory to his coming, but in later times it was purchased as now. Within the memory of the writer, the spinning of "shoe thread " and the manufacture of wax, was one of the fine arts of the family, and the upper and sole leather was tanned in the neighborhood tannery, on the shares from the hides of the beeves of the previous year. The workman having arrived, he finds his mate- rial and his quarters prepared for him, then commences the measur- ing of the little feet and the adaptation of " lasts" to the proper dimen- sions for all them, the mysterious manufacturing processes begin. The children then gather round to see the new modus operandi and to feast their juvenile vision on his sublime art. To them it is wonderful to see the cutting, soaking, stretching and beating the leather, and how curiously was constructed the cord with which those shoes were sewed, the uppers and soles together, and the tapering ends tipped with hog's bristles, was one of the culminations of the fine arts. Many an interesting hour in our childhood's days, have we watched Mr. Jerry Gough, go through the process above described, at our father's house, and how proud we felt when domiciled in our new shoes, we began our school term to Major David Hough or Jabez Spencer, in later years. But those days and years of the opera- tions of these primitive mechanics have passed away, and like our school-boy days, never to return. The improved machinery of the present day, has superceded the hand labor of the mechanic in this as in all other departments of labor, proving that the world progresses in all its varied appointments.
The Romance of Shoe Machinery.
To go back about twenty years, there were scattered all over New England many towns known as shoe-towns, where in shops the
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leather was cut by hand, then was parcelled out to makers, or " bot- tomers," who, for a portion of the year, labored upon the land, and and a portion of the year fishermen, but at odd times made boots and shoes. These boots and shoes were taken from the shop and brought back finished, varying time of completion from one week to six months, or even a year ; they were returned to the shop, ex- amined, packed in cases, and sent to the market for sale. The re- sult was that, to accumulate for a season sufficient shoes to meet the demands of the market, required six months of time. What is possible in these days of shoe machinery, read this : "A large shoe manufactory, turning out 2,400 pairs of shoes per day, was destroyed by fire on Wednesday night, with contents, valued at $75,000. It was a busy season, with plenty of orders on hand. On Thursday the manufacturer hired a neighboring building and set carpenters to fitting it up ; on Friday he ordered his machinery from Boston ; on Saturday the machinery arrived and the men set it up, on Mon- day work was started, and Tuesday he was filling orders as usual, turning out the full amount of 2,400 pairs." It is a great thing to save a manufacturer both his orders and customers-the savings of one season's profits ; but machinery is a big thing, especially in shoe-shops.
The Mckay Sewing Machine Company, which is now having a fight in Congress, sewed 45,000,000 pairs of shoes last year, and there were pegged upon the pegging machines 55,000,000 pairs last year. And those machines have entirely revolutionized the busi- ness. There were 450,000 bushels of loose pegs made in New Eng- land, and these pegs sell from sixty-five to seventy five cents per bushel ; yet a patented peg-wood (a strip or ribbon of wood cut across the grain, and of a width just equal to the length of a peg) has so superseded the loose pegs that last year there were 55,- 000,000 pairs of boots and shoes pegged with it. The whole ex- pense of this peg-wood averages about one-fourth of a cent per pair. Nearly 1,000 of these pegs are driven into the shoe in a minute, and there are about four to six pegs to an inch, or about twenty-two inches of pegging to a shoe. Over two hundred varie- ties of shoe machines are now in the market. The man who invented this peg-wood had to borrow money to enable him to perfect his de- vice and pay the fees of the solicitor and Patent Office, besides hav- ing borrowed $60,000 in order to introduce it into the market. It cost the parties who invested and introduced into the shoe-shops the " cable screw wire" machine $300,000. Six hundred pairs of peg-
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ged shoes can now be made in a day by a gang of ten men. Where before shoe-shops existed throughout New England, now shops have become larger, labor is classified and receives a larger com- pensation (strikes to the contrary notwithstanding), wages have advanced fifty to one hundred per cent. to the laborer, and the shoe in quality is twenty-five per cent. better than twenty-five years ago.
Light and Heat.
THEIR INFLUENCE ON VEGETATION.
In treating on this subject it will be our aim to give correct views of this all-sustaining and life-giving principle contained in light and heat, which leads also to the discovery of a wide and im- portant set of truths, all tending to the conclusion that these great agencies in connection with electricity and magnetism which up- holds life and produce such collossal changes on our globe are but expressions in different language of the One Great Power.
These various forms of energy are mutually convertable, and in considering the important influence exerted by each solar radiation on the phenomena of life we can see that each drop of rain or flake of snow, each mountain streamlet or brimming river owes its exis- tence to the sun's rays. It is by the sun's rays that the waters of the ocean are lifted up in the form of vapor into the air. It is by the condensation of this atmospheric moisture that every drop of running water on the earth's surface is formed. The balmy breeze and the devastating tornado are alike the product of the changes of atmospheric temperature, while the gradual crumbling of the everlasting hills and the consequent formation of stratified rocks are sublime illustrations of the might of the actions which during the geologic ages the sun has poured out upon the earth. Nor is this influence confined to the inorganic world. No plant can grow, no animal life exist without the vivifying influence of the sun's rays. The animal derives his store of energy from the plant necessary for the subsistence of life, and from the force locked up in the vege- table on which it feeds; the food of the animal undergoes combus- tion or oxydization in the body and the heat thereby evolved is converted into mechanical energy, so that the same laws, that which regulate the labor of animals, regulates the work done by the steam engine supplied with fuel. The animal draws its stores of energy from the plant, now where does the plant obtain the neccessary supplies for its growth and powers? The source of power in the plant is found in the sun's rays. It is the sun's rays that enables
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