- ter that compose it and make it heavy. But
really its substance is that which makes it an oak, that which weaves its bark and glues it to the stem, and wraps its rings of fresh wood around the trunk every year, and pushes out its boughs and clothes its twigs with digestive leaves and sucks up nutriment from the soil continually, and makes the roots clench the ground with their fibrous fingers as a purchase against the storm wind, and at last holds aloft its tons of matter against the constant tug and wrath of gravitation, and swings its Briarean arms in triumph over the globe and in defiance of the gale. Were it not for this energetic essence that crouches in the acorn and stretches its limbs every year, there would be no oak; the matter that clothes it would enjoy its stupid slumber; and when the forest monarch stands up in his sinewy lordliest pride, let the pervading life-power, and its vassal forces that weigh nothing at all, be annihilated, and the whole structure would wither in a second to inorganic dust. So every gigantic fact in nature is the index and vesture of a gigantic force.—Thomas Starr King.
(1125)
Force Unavailable—See Loyalty.
FORCES, LATENT
Mighty forces often lie latent in nature
until peculiar conditions elicit them. The
trembling dew-drop is an electric accumulator,
and within its silvery cells is stored a
vast energy; the rain-drop and the snow-*flake
are the sport of the wind, but, converted
into steam, we are astonished at their
potentiality; the tiny seed seems weakness
itself, yet, beginning to germinate, it rends
the rock like a thunderbolt.
Thus is it, only in a far more eminent
degree, with human nature strengthened
by the indwelling Spirit of God.
In the first hours of trial we may be bewildered,
stunned, staggered, but the
latent forces of our nature, stimulated
into action, render us equal to the most
trying situation and the most trying
moment.—W. L. Watkinson, "The
Transfigured Sackcloth."
(1126)
FORESIGHT
It would hasten the world's progress if each generation would consider the welfare of those to follow as carefully as did the church mentioned here:
Anticipating that airships will be in common
use in a few years, the officials of Wesley
Memorial Methodist Church, of Atlanta,
Georgia, when it was in process of building,
instructed the building committee to so arrange
the roof that there will be no difficulty
in adapting it to airship landings.
The officials declared that in future years the communicants of the church would sail to and from the services in airships, just as they now speed their automobiles. They say that as they are erecting a structure that will stand for 100 years it should be modern in every respect.
(1127)
See Prevision.
FORESIGHT IN BIRDS
Some red-headed woodpeckers in South
Dakota, preferring their meat fresh, evolved
a way to keep it so which compares favorably
with the "cold storage" of man. One
bird stored nearly one hundred grasshoppers
in a long crack in a post. All were living
when discovered, but so tightly wedged that
they could not escape, and during the long
winter of that region it is to be presumed
the prudent bird had his provision. The observer
found other places of storage full
of grasshoppers, and discovered that the
red-heads lived upon them nearly all winter.—Olive
Thorne Miller, "The Bird Our
Brother."
(1128)
Foresight, Lack of—See Prediction, False.
FORGERY, LITERARY
At the end of the eighteenth century the
literary forgers were especially active. The
Ossianic poems, the work of a Highland
schoolmaster, James McPherson, who pretended
to have translated them from the
Gaelic, raised a controversy that stirred up
much ill-feeling among the rulers of the literary
world of England. Then Chatterton,
"the sleepless soul that perished in its pride,"
as Wordsworth sings, with his remarkable
forgeries, deceived many of the antiquarians,
among them Horace Walpole, and even Dr.
Johnson "wondered how the young whelp
could have done it." Another young forger
was Ireland, a most remarkable impostor,
who, at the age of 18, not only forged papers
and legal documents purporting to be under
Shakespeare's own hand and seal, and so
deceived some of the most learned Shakespearian
scholars, but also produced a play
"Vortigern," which he claimed was by that
