Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/292

280* matter who was President or what London bankers charged for exchange. Shredded by ice and frost all winter, washed from impurities during the spring, and dried in sunlight in the early summer, the paper was completed and ready to store away when the grasses were high enough to shade the ground.

Thus the work went on all the year and all years until the present large supply is on hand. Before now I have been told, and indeed I have read in cyclopædias, that the wasps were the earliest paper makers, and that wasp nests were the first paper the world ever saw. This is evidently an erroneous idea. Grasses and rushes came on this planet long before wasps or bees, and coarse grasses with water and sunlight have perhaps been in partnership in the paper business since long before the coal age in America. Out here on my farm I can trace the history of this mill back to a time long before Adam walked in his garden, and I have every reason to believe there were other and similar mills in operation eons or cycles previous to the time mine began its work.

It is an interesting study to take up this latest issue of the great serial record and glance over the events which it noted right here during last summer. Of course a full story of the field's doings is not told, but I find enough to keep me busy and cause me to search for more. The tale is not twisted or distorted by reporters' imagination in order to make it read well, neither is it marred by typographical errors, causing the reader to guess at what was the writer's intention. The matrix was good and the impression was perfect all over the sheet. Writers of the realistic school, like Zola and Howells, can take lessons from this author, for here are the remains of the conflicts and tragedies narrated pressed flat upon the paper and terribly in evidence to vouch for every detail. Modern newspapers, with all their boasted push and enterprise, can never hope to equal this aged annual which dates its first number back to two thousand years before Methuselah began to grow whiskers.

Records of the whole season are found on this paper, telling the story of what has been going on in the animal world as plainly as if it were printed with life photographs and for sale on the street. Here are a half dozen "wiggler boats" that once served as skins for mosquito larvæ. When the wigglers grew large and were ready to quit the waters these cases cracked open along the back, and out stepped the mosquitoes, armed and equipped to prey upon the summer visitors. Near by are two legs and portions of the wing cases of a big locust. It is hard to tell whether he died a natural death or perished from violence. On looking at the fragments more closely, however, faint threads may be seen here and there, showing that he succumbed to some