In every hospital there is apt to be some dark closet which becomes by degrees a sort of museum of rejected apparatus. It slowly grows to a small mountain of old instrumental fossils, full of all sorts of broken and discarded trusses, aborted splints, deceased galvanic batteries whose dry cells no longer throb, and patent wooden legs, whose inventors died in poverty, because the legs would not run under the patients, nor the patients run after the legs.
My learned friend, Prof. D. R. Y. Cobwebs, has been excavating with great enthusiasm in our mountain. He declares that these fossils are arranged in regular decennial strata, with the ideas expanded horizontally, and that by the aid of his wonderful new science of comparative instrumentology he can tell the age of every specimen, from the primeval implements of Brainard up to the quaternary appliances of Andrews, Hollister, and Dudley. He goes