Page:Bassetts scrap book 1907 03-1909 02.djvu/31

 to naturalists is, roughly 156,000, of which 15,300 are vertebrates, or backboned. The ark must have been crowded.

It is calculated that 6,800 millions of men have been killed in battle since the beginning of the world.

A man who rides two hours each morning to reach his work and two more at night to get home, was asked: "Why do you do it? Why not live in town?" "Because I am one of those men," he answered, "who cannot be happy unless he has one spot of land on God's green earth upon which he can stand and call it his own. Because I would suffocate to live all my Hfe under a roof belonging to someone else. Because I want my children to grow up with the instinct of home, and not as mere dwellers in the tents of the migrating races. These are the reasons why I get up at daybreak and, at this time of year, eat my dinner by the gaslight."

How does it happen that we can accurately set down ages beforehand the most minute information as to the position of the stars, eclipses of the sun and moon, the hour, minute and second of high water on April 1, 3675 A. D., while we cannot tell whether it will be wet or fine next Saturday? The difficulty is, alas! that the laws, if any—and it is almost unthinkable that there are none—which govern weather changes have not yet been discovered.

The nations have established a Hague conference to put an end to the folly of war. Another confer-