most delicate food for the wheat. There was carbonic acid, that makes soda water so delicious, besides oxygen, that is so stimulating, nitrogen, ammonia, and half a dozen other things that are so nutritious to growing plants.

Thus the wheat grew up in beauty, headed out abundantly, and matured perfectly. Then the farmer stopped weeping for laughter, and in his joy he remembered to thank, not the sun, nor the wind, but the great One who made them both.

THE SUN'S GREAT HORSES

There was once a man who had thousands of acres of mighty forests in the distant mountains. They were valueless there, but would be exceedingly valuable in the great cities hundreds of miles away, if he could only find any power to transport them thither. So he looked for a team that could haul whole counties of forests so many miles. He saw that the sun drew the greatest loads, and he asked it to help him. And the sun said that was what he was made for; he existed only to help man. He said that he had made those great forests to grow for a thousand years so as to be ready for man when he needed them, and that he was now ready to help move them where they were wanted.

So he told the man who owned the forest that there was a great power, which men called gravitation, that seemed to reside in the center of the earth and every other world, but that it worked everywhere. It held the stones down to the earth, made the rain fall, and water to run down hill; and if the man would arrange a road, so that gravitation and the sun could work together, the forest would soon be transported from the mountains to the sea.

So the man made a trough a great many miles long, the two sides coming together like a great letter V. Then the sun brought water from the sea and kept the trough nearly full year after year. The man put into it the lumber and logs from the great forests, and gravitation pulled the lumber and water ever so swiftly, night and day, miles away to the sea.

How I have laughed as I have seen that perpetual stream of lumber and timber pour out so far from where the sun grew them for man. For the sun never ceased to supply the water, and gravitation never ceased to pull.

This man who relentlessly cut down the great forests never said, "How good the sun is!" nor, "How strong is gravitation!" but said continually, "How smart I am!"

OLD SUN HELP

Holland is a land that is said to draw twenty feet of water. Its surface is below sea level. Since 1440 they have been recovering land from the sea. They have acquired 230,000 acres in all. Fifty years ago they diked off 45,000 acres of an arm of the sea, called Haarlem Meer, that had an average depth of twelve and three quarters feet of water, and proposed to pump it out so as to have that much more fertile land. They wanted to raise 35,000,000 tons of water a month a distance of ten feet, to get through in time. Who could work the handle?

The sun would evaporate two inches a year, but that was too slow. So they used the old force of the sun, reservoired in former ages. Coal is condensed sunshine, still keeping all the old light and power. By a suitable engine they lifted 112 tons ten feet at every stroke, and in 1848, five years after they began to apply old sun force, 41,675 acres were ready for sale and culture.

The water that accumulates now, from rain and infiltration, is lifted out by the sun force as exhibited in wind on windmills. They groaningly work while men sleep.

The Netherlandish engineers are now devising plans to pump out the Zuyder Zee, an area of two thousand square miles. There is plenty of power of every kind for anything, material, mental, spiritual. The problem is the application of it. The thinker is king.

This is only one instance of numberless applications of old sun force. In this country coal does more work than every man, woman, and child in the whole land. It pumps out deep mines, hoists ore to the surface, speeds a thousand trains, drives great ships, in face of waves and winds, thousands of miles and faster than transcontinental trains. It digs, spins, weaves, saws, planes, grinds, plows, reaps, and does everything it is asked to do. It is a vast reservoir of force, for the accumulation of which thousands of years were required.

MOON HELP

At Foo-Chow, China, there is a stone bridge, more than a mile long, uniting the two parts of the city. It is not constructed with arches, but piers are built up from the bottom of the river and great granite stringers are laid horizontally from pier to pier. I measured some of these great stone stringers, and found them to be three feet square and forty-five feet long. They weigh over thirty tons each.

How could they be lifted, handled, and put in place over the water on slender piers? How was it done? There was no Hercules to perform the mighty labor, nor Amphion to lure them to their place with the music of his golden lyre.

Tradition says that the Chinese, being astute astronomers, got the moon to do the work. It was certainly very shrewd, if they did. Why not use the moon for more than a lantern? Is it not a part of the "all things" over which man was made to have dominion?

Well, the Chinese engineers brought the great granite blocks to the bridge site on floats, and when the tide lifted the floats and stones they blocked up the stones on the piers and let the floats sink with the outgoing tide. Then they blocked up the stones on the floats again, and as the moon lifted the tides once more they lifted the stones farther toward their place, until at length the work was done for each set of stones.

Dear, good moon, what a pull you have! You are not merely for the delight of lovers, pleasant as you are for that, but you are ready to do gigantic work.

No wonder that the Chinese, as they look at the solid and enduring character of that bridge, name it, after the poetic and flowery habit of the country, "The Bridge of Ten Thousand Ages."

MORE MOON HELP

Years ago, before there were any railroads, New York city had thousands of tons of merchandise it wished to send out West. Teams were few and slow, so they asked the moon to help. It was ready; had been waiting thousands of years.

We shall soon see that it is easy to slide millions of tons of coal down hill, but how could we slide freight up from New York to Albany?

It is very simple. Lift up the lower end of the river till it shall be down hill all the way to Albany. But who can lift up the end of the river? The moon. It reaches abroad over the ocean and gathers up water from afar, brings it up by Cape Hatteras and in from toward England, pours it in through the Narrows, fills up the great harbor, and sets the great Hudson flowing up toward Albany. Then men put their big boats on the current and slide up the river. Six hours later the moon takes the water out of the harbor and lets other boats slide the other way.

New York itself has made use of the moon to get rid of its immense amount of garbage and sewage. It would soon breed a pestilence, and the city be like the buried cities of old; but the moon comes to its aid, and carries away and buries all this foul breeder of a pestilence, and washes all the harbor and bay with clean floods of water twice a day. Good moon! It not only lights, but works.

The tide in New York Harbor rises only about five feet; up in the Bay of Fundy it ramps, rushes, raves, and rises more than fifty feet high.

In former times men used to put mill wheels into the currents of the tides; when they rushed into little bays and salt ponds they turned the wheels one way; when out, the other.

STAR HELP

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