An archaeological legend tells us that when our first parents? first born son saw the light Adam and Eve were as surprised as they there delighted. They had never seen a baby before, for this was the first mannikin that ever appeared on earth. They wrapped! him in the softest fig leaves and watched his development swith én-credulous interest. Adam had the curiosity to weigh him and found!
stone that exactly balanced the weight of the infant. This why a "stone" is one of the measures in avoirdupois and the Chinese symbol for a picul is still the idzograph for "stone." The baby was born when the pomegranate tree was in flower and when the tree flowered a second time the proud father with true scientific instinct, again improvised a weighing machine} qnd found to his delight that it took two stones of the same size to pull down the see-saw on the other end of which young hope-Jud lay sucking his thumb. This! was very satisfactory and yet it gave the fond parents furiously to think, Arithmetic had not yet been invented, but Adam proceeded to Loy down a row of stones! in arithmetical progression. First one stone, then two, then four and eight and 80 on. ' The garden' of Eden was not particularly' stony ground and before tong] there were not enough stones to continue the demonstration. But enough had been done to fill our! first parent with misgiving. He said to Eve, "If thie child continues developing at this rate, by the time the pomegranate tree has flowered and faded a hundred times Mount Ararat itself will nep equal his weight and the will not be sufficient space tween the earth and the firmament for kim to to stand upright." But Eve said, "I have found some delicious' bananas and a large cluster of sweet grapes; let us sit under the shadow of the tree of the knowledge of good ad evil and eat of the fruit of the garden. What will be a indrad years hondo is known only to the AN wise. Sufficient nto thin day is the evil and the good thereof." Man like, Adam succumbed to his wife's! appeal and Eve's daughters have ever since successfully imitated their first progenitor's attack on the solar plexus of the defence ese mate. And man Adam maintained to his dying day that his calculations were correct and that the failure of his prognostications was due to an insoluble mystery of nature even the wisdom of his latest descendants would fail to explain—Unauthentic sayings of Zarathrustra.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.