PHILIP DANFORTH ARMOUR

b. ? 1832 and d. January 6, 1901

American philanthropist, who began life as a farmer. At twenty he went West, returning four years later worth several thousand dollars, the result of hard labor as a miner on the Pacific coast. In 1856 he formed a partnership with Frederick B. Mills in a commission business, and later, one with John Plankinton, a pioneer packer; and a third with his two brothers, in beef and pork packing, which became the most extensive of its kind. They acquired enormous wealth, Mr. Armour having at his death, $50,000,000 or more. Much money was spent in charity, including the Armour Institute of Technology, Chicago, established in 1893.

The toils of alchemists, whose vain pursuit
Sought to transmute
Dross into gold, their secrets and their store
Of mystic love,
What to the jibing modern do they seem?
An ignis fatuus chase, a fantasy, a dream:

Yet for enlighten’d moral alchemists,
There still exists
A philosoph c stone, whose magic spell
No song e may tell,
Which renovates the soul’s decaying health,
And what it touches turns to purest mental health,

—Moral Alchemists: Horace Smith

b. ? 1775 and d. January 6, 1850

English inventor. The first to preserve wood by a chemical process, in 1832. His process was called “kyanizing.”

Turn back the tide of ages to its head,
And hoard the wisdom of the honored dead.

—Charles Sprague

Before my breath, like blazing flax,
Man and his marvels pass away;
And changing empires wane and wax,
Are founded, flourish, and decay.

Redeem mine hours—the space is brief,
While in my glass the sand-grains shiver,
And measureless the joy or grief,
Whentime and thou shallpart forever.

—Walter Scott

But who shall turn the glass for man,
When all his golden grains have run?
Who shall collect his scattered sand,
Dispersed by time’s unsparing hand?
Never can one grain be found,
Howe’er we anxious search around.

—J. McCreery

1665—Robert Hooke studied the use of air in combustion.

1761—Torbern Olof Bergman proved that fixed air is an acid.

1811—Chemicals were manufactured at Salem, Mass.

1800—Andrews and Tail demonstrated that ozone was a condensed form of oxygen.

Flourished 330 B.C.

Grecian artist, famous as a portrait painter. His most perfect picture was Venus Anadyomene. An intimate friend of Alexander the Great, all of whose portraits he painted. Alexander forbade any man but Apelles to draw his picture. He pictured Alexander holding thunder in his hand, which was sot ture to life that Pliny says the hand of the king with the thunder seemed to come out of the picture.

Around the mighty master came
The marvels which his pencil wrought,
Those miracles of power whose fame
Is wide as human thought.

—Raphael: Whittier

Deep buried in each heart I know there lies
A form divine, beneath the surface crude,
And when the master artist does bestow
His final touch, l’ perfect forms will rise.

—The Form Divine: C.W. Scarff

30—Augustus became a patron of art.

67—The Emperor Nero despoiled Corinth and its treaures in art.