The Locomotive - Lighthouse Survival Blog

1901.] THE LOCOMOTIVE. ^
which have been the occasion of much good-natured banter through all the almanac's
long life, "I need say but little, for you will in one year's time, without any assistance
• of niiue, very easily discover how near I have come to the truth." In view of this re-
mark, it is interesting to note that quite recently the city clerk of Providence K I.
kept a careful account of the Farmers' Almanac weather prognostications for one year
and at the end of this time announced that the predictions were correct in thirty-three
per cent, of all cases. During that same year the weather bureau's forecasts, which are
made only a single day in advance, were verified in thirty-five per cent, of the cases.
The fifty-fifth number of the Almanac contains the melancholy announcement of
the death of Mr. Thomas, which occurred on May 19, 1846. Iu the address to patrons
and correspondents the publishers say : "From respect to the memory of Mr. T. who
first planned the Almanac, and has edited it so long, and whose name is associated with
it in the minds of the friends of the work, that name will always be connected with it
in future as in past time." This promise has been religiously kept by all succeeding
publishers. In 1818, and iu every year since that time, a facsimile of Mr. Thomas'
signature has been appended to the address to " patrons and correspondents," an ad-
dress which ends always with this, his own sentiment : "It is by our works and not
by our words, we should be judged; these we hope will sustain us in the humble
though proud station we have so long held."
In 1892, a centennial number of the Almanac was published, and here was first
printed an excellent, full-length portrait of Robert B. Thomas, together with a touching
biographical sketch of Mr. Thomas, written by Dr. Samuel A. Green.
In recent years the Almanac has been the work of several men. An astronomer,
well known in New England, but too modest to care for advertising, looks after the
eclipses and the stellar complications; while one of those very men who make the
weather for the daily papers supplies that same commodity for the Farmers' Almanac.
Yet it is not for its weather prognostications, nor for its advice concerning sowing seed
and avoiding earthquakes, that most people value the Farmers? Almanac; but rather
because it has one of those old, familiar faces that Charles Lamb praised so delightfully.
We like, from year to year, to welcome the quaint little book in its dull yellow cover.
It takes us back to the days that are gone — days which, mellowed by perspective, seem
happy, even if we did not think them particularly so when they were still in the present
tense.— Boston Globe.
Casting* a Great Lens.
It had just turned afternoon in the furnace house of the glass works of Jena. For
upward of two hours everything had been in readiness for the casting of the great lens,
— everything except the glass. The master had directed the placing of the huge circu-
lar iron mold near the open doorway and just between the two furnaces — the one from
which now burst the fervid white radiance of the molten glass, and the one in which
through weeks of lessening heat the lens, when cast, was to be cooled and toughened
and tempered. The mold was a meter and a quarter in diameter— over four feet —
and the lens here to be cast would make one of the largest in the world, large enough to
bring the moon within a few score of miles of the earth, and one so perfect, perhaps, as
to surprise new secrets from the sun itself.
The master had sprinkled the bottom of the mold with fine sand from a curious tin
pot, that the hot glass might not take up impurities from the iron. A dozen biawny
workmen, in blue blouses and wooden-soled shoes, had come in to man the long, wheelmounted
tones which were to dra