PERVERTED INGENUITY'

Samoa Times and South Sea Gazette, Volume 2, Issue 90, 21 June 1879, Page 2

PERVERTED INGENUITY'

The Boston Journal of Chemist rythmics there is a good deal of perverted ingenuity in the world besides that which is directly criminal or mischievous in its pur. It is indirectly triniin:il because it is a waste of labour and skill, sometimes even of health and life, in doing a difficult but Utterly useless thing merely to show that it can be done, or for the sake of tlm notoriety which the achievement i a likely to gain. Every museum has specimens of this mis-applied toil and ingenuity—miniature models, Carvings, and the like, which are marvels of delicacy and elaboration, but of no real artiftic merit and of no possible practical value if a solitary prisoner in his cell beguiles the weary years of his confinement with such patient labour, for the lack of other employment of diversion, we pardon while we pity him. We may even forgive the Übiquitous old woman who displays at the country fair tho quilt of fourteen thousand anil odd pieces of patchwork, as fearful in design and colouring as it is complicated in structure; for it may never have occurred to the worthy dame, and no Christian friend may have reminded her, that the time and work spent upon it. would have served to knit some hundreds of pairs of hose for the barefoot poor, and have counted more to her credit on a certain long-running ledger than the coveted " premiunr*' or " honovrable mention " at the village show, liut when sensible and cultivated people deliberately combine in planning and carrying out sonic silly performance of this kind, thev ought not to receive the eulogies of the public press or the honours of international exhibitions,

Those criticisms have Leon suggested by the accounts in foreign journals of a book which we are told was put into the market at the close of the French exhibition. Its claim to distinction is the fact that it is the smallest book in the world. It is a " 12K mo "edition of Dante's " Divina Com media," printed at Padua last year; a volume of .">()() pages, measuring ."> centimeters (a tritle less than 2 inches) high, and 31 (less than 11J inch) broad. Only a thousand copies have been printed, and the type has been destn >yed. 1 1 can be read only with a powerful magnifying glass.

Verily a noble example of "the art preservative of all arts !'' Blindness and opthalmia for the workmen engaged upon it, and the rcsnlt a volume which nobody can road without a microscope, and which nobody will care to buy except the insatiable book-hunter or curiosity monger! Is not this a worthstribute to the great Florentine poet in this nineteenth century ( Could howith prophetic vision have anticipated it would he not have dedicated a warm corner in his " Inferno " to the special nccommadntion of .Signor Gnoccm and (Jantu, or whoever else is roeponsible for this infinitesimal monument of pcrfectesl ingenuity ! .Scientific American.