As to the practical results which may be attained by a gauging system, it may be said that they are far in advance of what is popularly supposed, especially in Europe, where gauges were first employed.
The prevailing custom of casting machine frames in one piece, or in as few pieces as possible, leads to a great deal of bar-boring, most of which can be performed accurately enough by boring bars supported in and fed through bearings. By setting up temporary bearings to support boring-bars, and improvising means of driving and feeding, most of the boring on machine frames can be performed on floors or sole plates and independent of boring machines and lathes. There are but few cases in which the importance of studying the principles of tool action is more clearly demonstrated than in this matter of boring; even long practical experience seldom leads to a thorough understanding of the [139] various problems which it involves.
ONE:317Dr. Beckers, Government veterinary surgeon at Veldwezelt, had also been taken to Bilsen as a hostage. The Germans asserted that the Belgians in Lanaeken had taken prisoner a German military veterinary surgeon who looked after the horses, and now intended to keep Dr. Beckers until the Belgians191 should have released the German military veterinary surgeon.
ONE:A great share of the handling about an engineering establishment is avoided, if material can be stored and received on a higher level than the working floors; if, for instance, coal, iron, and sand is received from railway cars at an elevation sufficient to allow it to be deposited where it is stored by gravity, it is equivalent to saving the power and expense required to raise the material to such a height, or move it and pile it up, which amounts to the same thing in the end. It is not proposed to follow the details [74] of shop arrangement, farther than to furnish a clue to some of the general principles that should be regarded in devising plans of arrangement. Such principles are much more to be relied upon than even experience in suggesting the arrangement of shops, because all experience must be gained in connection with special local conditions, which often warp and prejudice the judgment, and lead to error in forming plans under circumstances different from those where the experience was gained.
TWO:It was Hetty's turn to hold her peace now. Leona Lalage had not felt equal to facing Gordon at that moment. Even her iron will and resolution were not quite equal to the strain.
TWO:We now pass to the consideration of Aristotles most important achievementhis system of logic. And as, here also, we shall find much to criticise, it is as well to begin by saying that, in our opinion, his contributions to the science are the most valuable ever made, and perhaps have done more to advance it than all other writings on the same subject put together.
TWO:That same Friday evening the women and children living in the Rue de la Station were told to leave their houses as the whole street was to be burned down. Everybody fled, but the design was not executed. The burgomaster and his son were taken prisoners, and brought to Tongres; later on the son was released; the Very Reverend the Dean was also arrested.
TWO:In a caf, lower down, near the canal I saw a number of German soldiers, and was successful in having a chat with the inn-keeper, at the farthest corner of the bar. I asked him, of course, what they meant by burning the village, and he told me that the Germans had made a number of unsuccessful attacks on Fort Pontisse, until at last they reduced it to silence. They were now so near that they could open the final assault. They were afraid, however, of some ambush, or underground mine, and the Friday before they had collected the population, whom they forced to march in front of them. When they had got quite near they dared not enter it yet, and drove the priest and twelve of the principal villagers before them. That is how Pontisse was conquered.
THREE:My mysterious companion touched my shoulder198 and asked whether we should not go on. "All right," I said, and we got in again.When the power and value of these primitive speculations can no longer be denied, their originality is sometimes questioned by the systematic detractors of everything Hellenic. Thales and the rest, we are told, simply borrowed their theories without acknowledgment from a storehouse of Oriental wisdom on which the Greeks are supposed to have drawn as freely as Coleridge drew on German philosophy. Sometimes each system is affiliated to one of the great Asiatic religions; sometimes they are all traced back to the schools of Hindostan. It is natural that no two critics should agree, when the rival explanations are based on nothing stronger than superficial analogies and accidental coincidences. Dr. Zeller in his wonderfully learned, clear, and sagacious work on Greek philosophy, has carefully sifted some of the hypotheses referred to, and shown how destitute they are of internal or external evidence, and how utterly they fail to account for the facts. The oldest and best authorities, Plato and Aristotle, knew nothing about such a derivation of Greek thought from Eastern sources. Isocrates does, indeed, mention that Pythagoras borrowed his philosophy7 from Egypt, but Isocrates did not even pretend to be a truthful narrator. No Greek of the early period except those regularly domiciled in Susa seems to have been acquainted with any language but his own. Few travelled very far into Asia, and of those few, only one or two were philosophers. Democritus, who visited more foreign countries than any man of his time, speaks only of having discussed mathematical problems with the wise men whom he encountered; and even in mathematics he was at least their equal.9 It was precisely at the greatest distance from Asia, in Italy and Sicily, that the systems arose which seem to have most analogy with Asiatic modes of thought. Can we suppose that the traders of those times were in any way qualified to transport the speculations of Confucius and the Vedas to such a distance from their native homes? With far better reason might one expect a German merchant to carry a knowledge of Kants philosophy from K?nigsberg to Canton. But a more convincing argument than any is to show that Greek philosophy in its historical evolution exhibits a perfectly natural and spontaneous progress from simpler to more complex forms, and that system grew out of system by a strictly logical process of extension, analysis, and combination. This is what, chiefly under the guidance of Zeller, we shall now attempt to do.
THREE: His [Aristotles] theory of syllogism is simply an explicit statement of the fact that all knowledge, all thought, rests on universal truths or general propositionsthat all knowledge, whether deductive or inductive, is arrived at by the aid, the indispensable aid, of general propositions. We in England have been almost charmed into the belief that reasoning is perpetually from particular to particular, and a village matron and her Lucy have been used to express the truth for us in the concrete form adapted to our weaker comprehension (Mills Logic, bk. ii. ch. 3). We shall next be told, forsooth, that oxygen and hydrogen do not enter into the composition of water, because our village matron perpetually drinks it without passing through either element, and the analysis of the chemist will be proved as great a fiction as the analysis of the logician. Aristotle has supplied the links which at once upset all such superficial389 analysis. He has shown that even in analogy or example, which apparently proceeds in this way from one particular instance to another particular instance, we are only justified in so proceeding in so far as we have transformed the particular instance into a general proposition.284
