Life — February 5, 1903 — page 6: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

** While there is Life there's Hope.” vou. Xt PED. 5, 1903. No. 1058, every Taursday. tae tO foreign © Of publication. » contribution stamped ¢ returned untess and addressed The illustrations in Lark. are copyrighted, and are not to be reproduced. Prompt notification should be sent by sub- seribers of any change of address. gentlemen science seem dis- posed nowa- to vestigation of our family ree- ords to They keep excess. digging up all sorts of human docu- ments which they connect with us without asking leave. A man’s skele- ton was dng out of a hillside in Kansas a few months ago, whi was supposed to antedate the glacial peri- od, though sober second thought has since modernized it somewhat. Bat there was nothing mortifying to our pride abont the Kansas man. His bones were creditable enough bones, as bones go. Bat more recently still there have been dug out of the sub- cellar of a cave in Croatia, Austria parts of the skeletons of human crea- tures estimated to have lived more than two hundred thousand years ago. These last relics make somewhat for our dismay. The scientific gentlemen have deduced from them a man who had no forehead to speak of, and no chin ; who had a very long head, a flat face, enormons teeth in huge jaws, d long body, short legs and curved thigh bones. They think he could speak a little, that he walked with difficulty, and that he wasacannibal. They do not waste compliments on him, but they insist that he was a man, It seems a mistake to have too much ancestry, but at least these Croatian relics show that we have improved in -LIFE- looks, and even while our pride suffers there is a certain amount of encourage- ment in realizing how far we have come. »tt BREN ROM the Croatian man to Mr. Hewitt, for example, is a very long step. Nothing has been too good to say of Mr. Hewitt since he died, and it is comfortable to remember that in his case we did not wait until he died before expressing our sentiments about him. Fora good while, by something like common consent, he had been re- garded as New York's first citizen. He had opponents—a man as active in affairs as he is bound to have oppo- nents—but if he ever had enemies, he had ontlived them, and he had pretty much outlived opposition too. He had come to be so generally recognized asa wise and devoted servant of the public, that his desires and opinions on apy matter of concern to the people of New York had more influence than those of any other man, He was so tireless in well-doing, wise in counsel and effect- ive in action, that it was a great ad- vantage to this community to have him live his time so well and gloriously out. He was successful in the com- mon, limited sense of the world, for he accumulated wealth, but we admired him not for what he acquired but for what he gave out, and not even for the money he gave, but for his lavish bestowal of himself—his time, his strength, his heart and his judgment— on matters that concerned the present happiness and future welfare of his fellow-countrymen. It is invaluable to any city or any country to have in it men of supreme ability who are aggressively good, and make it a part of their daily duty to work for right- cousness in time present, and for the betterment of generations to come. Such men leave the world better than they found it, and it is by their efforts civilization moves on. A NOTHER admirable citizen, whose light we trust may long shine to provoke his fellow-countrymen to good works, is Governor Taft of Ohio and the Philippines. His choice of an occupation, as we all know, is to be a Judge of the United States Supreme Court, and as we also know, the Presi- dent is more than ready, when the chance offers, to give him what he wants. But he went to Manila to help to do our work there, and though it is not particularly good for him to be there, and his health has suffered, the Filipinos feel that it is particularly good for them to have him there,and he has put his own hopes and wishes bebind him again and will stay in the Philip- pines until he can better be spared than now. Manila protested so fervently when he proposed to come home that he relented. It indicatesa hopeful pitch of intelligence in the Filipinos that they appreciate Governor Taft, and his self- sacrificing preference of the duty at hand to other and more congenial labors will be gratefully remembered by his fellow-countrymen, Tay (HE Flatiron building in New York is extremely tall of its age, and extremely flat. Its renown has gone very much abroad. It advertises itself in the papers pictorially and in type, and also by its flirtations with the wind. The wind comes boistering along on windy days, hits the Flatiron inattentively on its thin end, and next thing it has blown down a policeman and six ladies on Broadway, and has been hurled througha handfal of plate glass windows across the street. The wind does not resent this treatment, but the ladies and the policemen think itrough, and one of the owners of plate glass, who is out of pocket by it, has brought suit against the Flatiron and wants damages. It isa novel and un- precedented suit which the owners of tall buildings will doubtless watch with interest if it ever comes to trial. What the Flatiron and the other cloud- capped edifices need is a wind storage which, instead of turning sto the detriment of the neighbors, will gather their va- grant energy and turn it to account in running elevators and making electric light. comicbooks.com