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really its substance is that which makes it an oak, that which weaves its bark and glues it to the stem, and wraps its rings of fresh wood around the trunk every year, and pushes out its boughs and clothes its twigs with digestive leaves and sucks up nutriment from the soil continually, and makes the roots clench the ground with their fibrous fingers as a purchase against the storm wind, and at last holds aloft its tons of matter against the constant tug and wrath of gravitation, and swings its Briarean arms in triumph over the globe and in defiance of the gale. Were it not for this energetic essence that crouches in the acorn and stretches its limbs every year, there would be no oak; the matter that clothes it would enjoy its stupid slumber; and when the forest monarch stands up in his sinewy lordliest pride, let the pervading life-power, and its vassal forces that weigh nothing at all, be annihilated, and the whole structure would wither in a second to inorganic dust. So every gigantic fact in nature is the index and vesture of a gigantic force.—
 * ter that compose it and make it heavy. But

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Force Unavailable—See.

FORCES, LATENT

Mighty forces often lie latent in nature until peculiar conditions elicit them. The trembling dew-drop is an electric accumulator, and within its silvery cells is stored a vast energy; the rain-drop and the snow-*flake are the sport of the wind, but, converted into steam, we are astonished at their potentiality; the tiny seed seems weakness itself, yet, beginning to germinate, it rends the rock like a thunderbolt.

Thus is it, only in a far more eminent degree, with human nature strengthened by the indwelling Spirit of God. In the first hours of trial we may be bewildered, stunned, staggered, but the latent forces of our nature, stimulated into action, render us equal to the most trying situation and the most trying moment.—, "The Transfigured Sackcloth."

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FORESIGHT

It would hasten the world's progress if each generation would consider the welfare of those to follow as carefully as did the church mentioned here:

Anticipating that airships will be in common use in a few years, the officials of Wesley Memorial Methodist Church, of Atlanta, Georgia, when it was in process of building, instructed the building committee to so arrange the roof that there will be no difficulty in adapting it to airship landings.

The officials declared that in future years the communicants of the church would sail to and from the services in airships, just as they now speed their automobiles. They say that as they are erecting a structure that will stand for 100 years it should be modern in every respect.

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See.

FORESIGHT IN BIRDS

Some red-headed woodpeckers in South Dakota, preferring their meat fresh, evolved a way to keep it so which compares favorably with the "cold storage" of man. One bird stored nearly one hundred grasshoppers in a long crack in a post. All were living when discovered, but so tightly wedged that they could not escape, and during the long winter of that region it is to be presumed the prudent bird had his provision. The observer found other places of storage full of grasshoppers, and discovered that the red-heads lived upon them nearly all winter.—, "The Bird Our Brother."

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Foresight, Lack of—See.

FORGERY, LITERARY

At the end of the eighteenth century the literary forgers were especially active. The Ossianic poems, the work of a Highland schoolmaster, James McPherson, who pretended to have translated them from the Gaelic, raised a controversy that stirred up much ill-feeling among the rulers of the literary world of England. Then Chatterton, "the sleepless soul that perished in its pride," as Wordsworth sings, with his remarkable forgeries, deceived many of the antiquarians, among them Horace Walpole, and even Dr. Johnson "wondered how the young whelp could have done it." Another young forger was Ireland, a most remarkable impostor, who, at the age of 18, not only forged papers and legal documents purporting to be under Shakespeare's own hand and seal, and so deceived some of the most learned Shakespearian scholars, but also produced a play "Vortigern," which he claimed was by that