counted on their fingers, because they always had those ten little counters with them. Children count in that way at first, and it is several years before they can think numbers inside their curly heads, without using these lively little counters. Here is a curious thing. Men got so very, very wise after awhile that they thought they could improve on natures way of counting. In England the money system is all mixed up. A penny is two cents; a sixpence, twelve cents; a shilling, twenty four cents; a crown, two and a half shillings, or sixty cents; a pound, twenty shillings, or four dollars and eighty cents. You see your fingers don’t help you a bit. Measurements are made by twelve inches in a foot, three feet in a yard, and so on up to acres of land. Milk is measured by pints, quarts and gallons. English "tables" are terrible things to learn in school, and there is really no rule or sense in them.
In America we use these English tables, except for money. There we go back to nature's tens. Ten cents one dime, ten dimes one dollar, ten hundreds one thousand, and so on. A "nickel" is half a dime, or five cents, the same as the pink fingers baby learns to count with. In France everything—money, land, potatoes, ribbon, gold at the jeweller's, quinine at the drug store, gas out of a pipe, is measured and counted by tens. This is called the metric system. Already this French metric system is used by scientific men, and it is thought, some day, as the peoples of the earth travel and trade more and more, we will all adopt this way of counting and measuring everything. So you see, it is pretty hard for men to be wiser than old Mother Nature.
WHY DOES IRON RUST?
When you growl up and are very, very wise you will not say that iron rusts. You will say it becomes oxidized. That means that the surface of the iron is burnt by the oxygen of the air, Rust is really an iron ash. You can rub old rust oft in a powder as fine as ashes. These iron ashes mix with the soil, giving it its good brown or red color. They dissolve in water, are taken up by plants and used to make their green color. Finally, through water and plants, we take iron into our bodies to give us the red color of our blood.
Isn't it a fine thing that iron can rust, or be burnt to a red ash by the oxygen of the air. Gold and silver do not rust, and so they are called the noble metals. But John Ruskin, a great English writer who thought the most useful things and men the noblest, said of
