Читать книгу Harper's New Monthly Magazine, No. XI.—April, 1851—Vol. II. - Various - Страница 9

Every body uses pins – men, women, and children. Every body buys them. Every body bends them, breaks them, knocks off their heads, and loses them. They enter into every operation, from the drawing-room to the scullery. Go where you will, if you look sharp, you may calculate with certainty on picking up a pin – in the streets, in the cabs, on door-steps and mats, in halls and drawing-rooms, sticking in curtains and sofas, and paper-hangings, in counting-houses and lawyers' offices, keeping together old receipts and bills, and fragments of papers, in ladies' needlework, in shopkeepers' parcels, in books, bags, baskets, luggage – they are to be found every where, let them get there how they may, by accident or design. Their ubiquity is astounding – and their manufacture, being in proportion to it, must be something prodigious. There is no article of perpetual use with which we are so familiar; and out of this familiarity springs indifference, for there is no article about whose final destination we are so profoundly ignorant. We know well enough the end of things (not half so useful to us) that wear out in the course of time, or that are liable to be smashed, cracked, chipped, put out of order, or otherwise rendered unavailable for further service; but of the fate of this little article, so universal in its application, so indispensable in its utility, we know nothing whatever. Nobody ever thinks of asking, What becomes of the Pins? For our own parts, we should be very glad to get an answer to that question, and should be very much obliged to any person who could furnish us with it.

The question is by no means an idle one. If we could get at the statistics of pins, we should have some tremendous revelations. The loss in pins, strayed, stolen, and mislaid, is past all calculation. Millions of billions of pins must vanish – no woman alive can tell how or where – in the course of a year. Of the actual number fabricated, pointed, headed, and papered up for sale from one year's end to another (remember they are to be found in every house, large and small, within the pale of civilization), we should be afraid to venture a conjecture; but, judging from what we know of their invincible tendency to lose themselves, and our own inveterate carelessness in losing them, we apprehend that, could such a return be obtained, it would present an alarming result. Think of millions of billions of pins being in course of perpetual disappearance! And that this has been going on for centuries and centuries, and will continue to go on, probably, to the world's end. A grave matter to contemplate, my masters! A pin, in its single integrity, is a trifle, atomic, in comparison with other things that are lost and never found again. But reflect for a moment upon pins in the aggregate. The grand sum-total of human life is made up of trifles – all large bodies are composed of minute particles. Years are made up of months, months of weeks, weeks of days, days of hours, hours of minutes, minutes of seconds; and, coming down to the seconds, and calling in the multiplication-table to enlighten us, we shall find that there are considerably upward of thirty-one millions of them in a year. Try a similar experiment with the pins. Assume any given quantity of loss in any given time, and calculate what it will come to in a cycle of centuries. Most people are afraid of looking into the future, and would not, if they could, acquire a knowledge of the destiny that lies before them. Pause, therefore, before you embark in this fearful calculation; for the chances are largely in favor of your arriving at this harrowing conclusion, that, by the mere force of accumulation and the inevitable pressure of quantity, the great globe itself must, at no very distant period, become a vast shapeless mass of pins.

As yet we have no signs or tokens of this impending catastrophe, and are entirely in the dark about the process that is insidiously conducting us to it; and hence we ask, in solemn accents, What becomes of the Pins? Where do they go to? How do they get there? What are the attractive and repulsive forces to which they are subject after they drop from us? What are the laws that govern their wanderings? Do they dissolve and volatilize, and come back again into the air, so that we are breathing pins without knowing it? Do they melt into the earth, and go to the roots of vegetables, so that every day of our lives we are unconsciously dining on them? The inquiry baffles all scholarship; and we are forced to put up with the obscure satisfaction which Hamlet applies to the world of apparitions, that there are more pins in unknown places and unsuspected shapes upon the earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.