The Locomotive - Lighthouse Survival Blog

102 THE LOCOMOTIVE. [July,
t S**iMII*ti*
HARTFORD, JULY 15, 1901.
J. M. Allen, A.M., M.E., Editor. A. D. Risteen, Associate Editor,
The Locomotive can be obtained free by calling at any of the company's agencies.
Subscription price 50 cents per year when mailed from this office.
Bound volumes one dollar each. (Any volume can be supplied.)
We have received, from the publishers, a copy of An Englishwoman's Love Letters,
with a request that we give it a review in The Locomotive. We have no regular love
letter editor on our staff, and we therefore turned it over, first, to our expert on riveted
joints, who is reputed to have had some experience in such matters. He says that the
writer of the letters is badly designed ; that she has a poor circulation and a cracked
head, and that a few bricks are loose in her setting ; and he swears he will take no re-
sponsibility for her, until she has been submitted to a hydrostatic test of at least a thou-
sand pounds. His judgment has always been good on matters more directly in his line,
but we were so sure that it was in error in this particular case that we took the book
away from him and made a complete internal inspection of it ourselves. We quickly
found that the language is so warm that our expert on combustion was the proper man
to consult. He was away on his vacation, however, and we didn't want to call him
back to make a calorimeter test during this hot weather. Our chemist shook his head
sadly when we offered the job to him, and the only available man left on our staff was
the automobile editor, who takes the place of the horse editor that we discharged when
the horse went out of fashion. He says the author has wheels all right. He doesn't
wish to condemn the book though, for he says that while it isn't in his line, he should
judge that it would be hot stuff in somebody else's line. With this sentiment we
heartily agree. It is our custom, in reading a work of fiction, to pick out the one pas-
sage in the whole book that seems to be most pat. We think we have found it, in this
book, on page 203, where the author of the letters says to her hubby, "Oh, how tired
loving you now makes me!" To which we would fervently respond, "Amen !" (Laird
ct Lee, Chicago.)
A Queer Little Planet.
It is well known to students of astronomy that between the orbits of Mars and Jupi-
ter there is a host of little planets, which circulate around the sun in orbits of their own.
These tiny members of the solar system are so small that they cannot be seen with the
unaided eye, and no man knows how many there are of them. Some hundreds are
known to-day, and others are being discovered all the time. The labor of calculating
the motions of these objects is so great that some of them have actually been lost,
because there were not astronomers enough who could afford to spend the time to keep
track of them. It is not a very uncommon experience to find that an apparently new
member of the family is really only a old one that had been lost — the identification
being made by tracing the motion of the newly-discovered one backwards until it turns
out to have been, on some particular date, in precisely the same position that one of the
lost ones was known to have been in at that date.