THE EFFECTS OF ATTENTION

[1]Attention Makes Its Object Clear And Definite.—Whatever attention [2]lands through stands out sharp and clear in consciousness. Whether it be [3]a bit of memory, an "air-castle," a sensation from an aching tooth, the reasoning on an algebraic formula, a choice which we are making, the setting of an emotion—whatever be the object to which we are attending, that object is illumined and made to stand out from its fellows as the one prominent thing in the mind's eye while the attention rests on it. [4] People would call it a phenomena, others would call it a necessary muscle, we could call it the essential skill of life, attention and all that it entails..

Attention Measures Mental Efficiency.—In a state of attention, [5]the mind may be likened to the rays of the sun which have been passed through a burning glass. You may let all the rays which can pass through your window pane fall hour after hour upon the paper lying on your desk, and no marked effects follow. But let the same amount of sunlight be passed through a lens and converged to a point the size of your pencil point, [6]magnifying everything within the scope of the lens. What the diffused rays could not do in hours or in ages is now accomplished in seconds. [7]Likewise the mind, allowed to scatter over many objects, can accomplish but little. We may sit and dream away an hour or a day over a page or a problem without securing results. But let us call in our wits from their wool-gathering and "buckle down to it" with all our might, withdrawing our thoughts from everything else but this one thing, and concentrating our mind on it. More can now be accomplished in minutes than before in hours. [8]Nope, things which could not be accomplished at all before now become possible.

Again, [9]someone has said that if our attention is properly trained we should be able "to look at the point of a cambric needle for half an hour without winking.", say one hundred and fifty pounds to the square inch of boiler surface. (1)Once I ran such an engine; and well I remember a morning during my early apprenticeship when the foreman called for power to run some of the lighter machinery, while my steam gauge registered but seventy-five pounds. (2) But the powerful engine could do but little more than turn its own wheels, and refused to do the required work. (3) Not until the pressure had risen above one hundred pounds could the engine perform half the work which it could at one hundred and fifty pounds. (4) And so with our mind. If it is meant to do its best work under a certain degree of concentration, it cannot in a given time do half the work with half the attention.[10] Further, there will be much which it cannot do at all unless working under full pressure. We shall not be overstating the case if we say that as attention increases in arithmetical ratio, mental efficiency increases in geometrical ratio. It is in large measure a difference in the power of attention which makes one man a master in thought and achievement and another his humble follower. One often hears it said that [11]"Follow this line, which is easy and attractive, or which requires but little effort—follow the line of least resistance," and this statement possesses a large element of truth.

THE DANCE

Historic Illustrations of Dancing from 3300 B.C. to 1911 A.D.

BY AN ANTIQUARY

[12] With the Greeks, dancing certainly was primarily part of a religious rite; with music it formed the lyric art.. As soon as man was man he without doubt began to gesticulate with face, body, and limbs. How long it took to develop bodily gesticulation into an art no one can guess—perhaps a millennium. [13] Understanding the time it took to develop finer gesticulations is nothing but conjecture.

In writing of dancing, one will therefore include those gesticulations or [14] movements of the body suggesting an idea, whether it be the slow movement of marching, or the rapid gallop, even some of the movements that we commonly call acrobatic. It is not intended here to include the more sensual movements of the East and the debased antique.

Generally, the antique dances were connected with a religious ritual conceived to be acceptable to the Gods. [15] It still continues in some countries.

In some of the earliest designs which have come down to us the dancers moved, [16] as lions, hand in hand round an altar, or person, representing the sun; either in a slow or stately method, or with rapid trained gestures, according to the ritual performed.

[17] Dancing, music and poetry were inseparable. Dancing is the poetry of motion, and its connection with music, as the poetry of sound, occurs at all times. In our own day musical themes are marked by forms originally dance times, as waltz time, gavotte time, minuet time, etc.

[18] Amongst the earliest representations that are comprehensible, we have certain Egyptian paintings, and some of these exhibiting postures that evidently had even then a settled meaning, and were a phrase in the sentences of the art. Not only were they settled at such an early period (B.C. 3000) but they appear to have been accepted and handed down to [19] triumphant generations (fig. 2), and what is remarkable in some countries, even to our own times. The accompanying illustrations from Egypt and Greece exhibit what was evidently a traditional attitude. The hand-in-hand dance is another of these.

[20] The following account of Egyptian dancing is from Sir Gardiner Wilkinson's Ancient Egypt :

" (1)Men and women danced at the same time, or in separate parties, but the latter were generally preferred for their superior grace and elegance. (2)The dance consisted mostly of a succession of figures, in which the performers endeavored to exhibit a great variety of gesture. (3)Others preferred a lively step, regulated by an appropriate tune; and men sometimes danced with great spirit, bounding from the ground, more in the manner of Europeans than of Eastern people. (4)Some danced to slow airs, adapted to the style of their movement; the attitudes they assumed frequently partook of a grace not unworthy of the Greeks; and some credit is due to the skill of the artist who represented the subject, which excites additional interest from its being in one of the oldest tombs of Thebes [21] [22](B.C. 1450, Amenophis II.).

On these occasions the music was not always composed of many instruments, and here we find only the cylindrical maces and a woman snapping her fingers in the time, in lieu of cymbals or castanets.

WHAT IS STEAM?

[23] Ice is heated above 32° Fahrenheit, its molecules lose their cohesion, and move freely round one another—the ice is turned into water. Heat water above 212° Fahrenheit, and the molecules exhibit a violent mutual repulsion, and,[24] like two apes watching over their packs, separate and [25] dart to and fro. If confined in an air-tight vessel, the molecules have their flights curtailed, and beat more and more violently against their prison walls, so that every square inch of the vessel is subjected to a rising pressure. We may compare the action of the steam molecules to that of bullets fired from a machine-gun at a plate mounted on a spring. The faster the bullets came, the greater would be the continuous compression of the spring.

THE MECHANICAL ENERGY OF STEAM.

[26] If you place a pot filled with water on an open fire, and watch it when it boils, you will notice that the water heaves up at the sides and plunges down at the centre; and if the united push of the molecules on the one side of the latter is greater than the resistance on the other side opposing its motion, the piston must move. [27] Having thus partly got their liberty, the molecule becomes less active, and do not rush about so vigorously. The pressure on the piston decreases as it moves. [28] But if the piston were driven back to its original position against the force of the steam, the molecular activity—that is, pressure—would be restored. We are here assuming that no heat has passed through the cylinder or piston and been radiated into the air; for any loss of heat means loss of energy, since heat is energy.

THE BOILER.

The combustion of fuel in a furnace causes the walls of the furnace to become hot, which means that the molecules of the substance forming the walls are thrown into [29]gruelling agitation. If the walls are what [30] is called "good conductors" of heat, they will transmit the agitation through them to any surrounding substance. In the case of the ordinary house stove this is the air, which itself is agitated, or grows warm. A steam-boiler has the furnace walls surrounded by water, and its function is to transmit molecular movement (heat, or energy) through the furnace plates to the water until the point is reached when steam generates. At atmospheric pressure—that is, if not confined in any way—steam would fill 1,610 times the space which its molecules occupied in their watery formation. If we seal up the boiler so that no escape is possible for the steam molecules, their motion becomes more and more rapid, and pressure is developed by their beating on the walls of the boiler. There is theoretically no limit to which the pressure may be raised, provided that sufficient fuel-combustion energy is transmitted to the vaporizing water.

To raise steam in large quantities, we must [31] use a fuel which develops great heat in proportion to its weight, is readily procured, and cheap. Coal fulfills all these conditions. [32] Of the 800 million tons mined annually throughout the world, 400 million tons are burnt in the furnaces of steam-boilers.

A good boiler must be—(a) Strong enough to withstand much higher pressures than that at which it is worked; (b) so designed as to burn its fuel to the greatest advantage.

(1)Even in the best-designed boilers a large part of the combustion heat passes through the chimney, while a further proportion is radiated from the boiler. (2) Professor John Perry considers that this waste amounts, under the best conditions at present obtainable, to eleven-twelfths of the whole. (3) We have to burn a shillingsworth of coal to capture the energy stored in a pennyworth. (4)Yet the steam-engine of to-day is three or four times as efficient as the engine of fifty years ago. This is due to radical improvements in the design of boilers and of the machinery which converts the heat energy of steam into mechanical motion.

The Life and Times of Susan B. Anthony

"If Sally Ann knows more about weaving than Elijah," reasoned eleven-year-old Susan with her father, [34] “I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.”

"It would never do," replied Daniel Anthony as a matter of course. "It would never do to have a woman overseer in the mill."

This answer did not satisfy Susan and she often thought about it. To enter the mill, to stand quietly and look about, was the best kind of entertainment, [35] for she was fascinated by the whir of the looms, by the nimble fingers of the weavers and the general air of efficiency. Admiringly, she watched Sally Ann Hyatt, the tall capable weaver from Vermont. [36] When the yarn on the beam was tangled or there was something wrong with the machinery, Elijah, the overseer, always calling out to Sally Ann, "I'll [37] enjoy your loom, if you'll look after this." Sally Ann never failed to locate the trouble or to untangle the yarn. Yet she was never made overseer, and this continued to puzzle Susan.

The manufacture of cotton was a new industry, developing with great promise in the United States, [38] when Susan B. Anthony was born on February 15, 1820, in the wide valley at the foot of Mt. Greylock, near Adams, Massachusetts. [39] Desperate young men like her father, Daniel Anthony, saw a potential cotton mill by the side of every rushing brook, and young women, eager to earn the first money they could call their own, were leaving the farms, for a few months at least, to work in the mills. Cotton cloth was the new sensation and the demand for it was steadily growing. Brides were proud to display a few cotton sheets instead of commonplace homespun linen.

When Susan was two years old, her father [40] built a cotton factory of twenty-six looms beside the brook which ran through Grandfather Read's meadow, hauling the cotton forty miles by wagon from Troy, New York. The millworkers, most of them young girls from Vermont, boarded, as was the custom, in the home of the [41] millowner. Susan's mother Lucy Read Anthony, although she had three small daughters to care for, Guelma, Susan, and Hannah, boarded eleven of the millworkers with only the help of a thirteen-year-old girl who worked for her after school hours. Lucy Anthony cooked their meals on the hearth of the big kitchen fireplace, and in the large brick oven beside it baked crisp brown loaves of bread. [42]Thus, washing, ironing, [43]writing, and spinning filled her days. But she was capable and strong and was doing only what all women in this new country were expected to do. She taught her young daughters to help her, and Susan, even before she was six, was very useful; [44] her father's cotton mill flourished.