Here are a few useful things I learned while reading Buchanan’s Journal Of Man, Volume 1 Number 4, published in May 1887:

“Pianos have lately been made from paper in Germany, instead of wood, with great improvement in the tone.”

“There is no denying that the young man about town of the nineteenth century is a blot upon our boasted modern civilization. His is not a pleasant figure to contemplate, though it is one that we all see very often and know very well – clothed irreproachably in the most expensive raiment that London tailors and unlimited credit can supply. He lives lazily and luxuriously on his father’s money and his wife’s, and, being after his natural term of days laid away in a tomb at Mt. Auburn, ends his existence without making any more impression upon the world’s history than a falling rose leaf, or an August cricket’s faintest chirp.”

“In 1885 we were informed of the success of spirits at Cleveland, Ohio, in communicating messages by the telegraphic method in rapping, in which our millionaire friend, Mr. J. H. Wade, has taken much interest. A little apparatus has been constructed, with which the spirits give their communications in great variety. I have repeatedly stated that the diagnoses and prescriptions of deceased physicians have always proved in my experience more reliable than those of the living. This has been verified at Cleveland. The late Dr. Wells of Brooklyn has been giving diagnoses and prescriptions through the telegraph.”

I think we can agree with the correspondent of the Vineland Rostrum, who said of the Journal’s editor J R Buchanan “We never read an article from the pen of this world-renowned thinker, but that we feel we are in the presence of one whose shoes’ latchet we are unworthy to unloose”.

Many thanks to Odd Ends.