Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 56.djvu/508

494 reach over the exact space on the orbit of one half of the mean solar day, and beginning at the red noon point of one of the four days in the year when the true noon falls at just twelve o'clock—say December 24th—and step the dividers around on the orbit, making a blue point mark at each second step, then as the blue points vary from the red so will the mean time which our clocks keep vary from the true noon of each day of the year. Variation in length of forenoon and afternoon, therefore, may be viewed by common intelligence not only as a fact but as a necessity.



The inclosed, from an anonymous but appreciative source, may interest you. It is doubtless true that the philosophy of feminism goes back to India, through Hegel and Plato, but the high priestess does not know this. She made it all out of her own head.

I have before me the last issue of one of our two or three great scientific magazines, in which Mr. Giddings lays down the exact method we are to follow in sociology, thereby creating the pleasing impression that hereafter he intends to stick to it himself. But, sir, I wish to say, as a student of "feminism," as you call it, that my emotions were far less agreeable on perusing your brilliant plagiarism, the doctrine of Nihil nemini nocet, an aphorism which apparently you wish to make rival the Cogito ergo sum of the Cartesian philosophy. I will concede to you (I being, as it is perhaps necessary for me to remark, a literary person) the undoubted right all real literary persons have of appropriating everything of a literary nature that they can lay their hands upon; but, while we are in perfect harmony upon this occasion, in regard to that point, I regret to insist that the thing must be done judiciously—that is the art. Any mere plebeian can accumulate facts—that is the raison d'être of the plebeian; his duty is to work—but the real ethereal literary man, such as the monthly magazines nourish, must