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To: Pontiac
World's first prosthetic limb found on 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummy

Not the oldest found so far, mind you, but the first!
Right there it is marked, in fine print, "First prosthetic limb ever produced - made in China". How can anyone dispute that?

Now, if I wanted to be one of those ponderous scientific people, and "let on" to prove what had occurred in the remote past by what had occurred in a given time in the recent past, or what will occur in the far future by what has occurred in late years, what an opportunity is here! Geology never had such a chance, nor such exact data to argue from! Nor "development of species," either! Glacial epochs are great things, but they are vague--vague. Please observe:--

In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oölitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, Chapter XVII (Pg 209)

18 posted on 07/28/2007 11:45:05 PM PDT by Publius6961 (MSM: Israelis are killed by rockets; Lebanese are killed by Israelis.)
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To: Publius6961
I noticed that remark when I first read it. I attribute those words to the author and not to the scientist. I can not imagine a scientist saying something so obviously improvable.

Mark Twain had a fantastic mind, did he not?

19 posted on 07/29/2007 12:15:43 AM PDT by Pontiac (Patriotism is the natural consequence of having a free mind in a free society.)
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