ouette on a safety pin, which is
indeed mightier than the sword. When Adam delved and Eve did
spin, what did they do for a safety pin?

Great is the stride when an infant passes from the safety pin
period to the age of buttons. There are three ages of human
beings in this matter: (1) Safety pins, (2) Buttons, (3) Studs,
or (for females) Hooks and Eyes. Now there is an interim in the
life of man when he passes away from safety pins, and, for a
season, knows them not--save as mere convenience in case of
breakdown. He thinks of them, in his antic bachelor years, as
merely the wrecking train of the sartorial system, a casual
conjunction for pyjamas, or an impromptu hoist for small clothes.
Ah! with humility and gratitude he greets them again later,
seeing them at their true worth, the symbol of integration for
the whole social fabric. Women, with their intuitive wisdom, are
more subtle in this subject. They never wholly outgrow safety
pins, and though they love to ornament them with jewellery,
precious metal, and enamels, they are naught but safety pins
after all. Some ingenious philosopher could write a full tractate
on woman in her relation to pins--hairpins, clothes pins, rolling
pins, hatpins.

Only a bachelor, as we have implied, scoffs at pins. Hamlet
remarked, after seeing the ghost, and not having any Sir Oliver
Lodge handy to reassure him, that he did not value his life at a
pin's fee. Pope, we believe, coined the contemptuous phrase, "I
care not a pin." The pin has never been done justice in the
world of poetry. As one might say, the pin has had no Pindar. Of
course there is the old saw about see a pin and pick it up, all
the day you'll have good luck. This couplet, barbarous as it is
in its false rhyme, points (as Mother Goose generally does) to a
profound truth. When you see a pin, you must pick it up. In other
words, it is on the floor, where pins generally are. Their
instinctive affinity for terra firma makes one wonder why they,
rather than the apple, did not suggest the law of gravitation to
someone long before Newton.

Incidentally, of course, the reason why Adam and Eve were
forbidden to pick the apple was that it was supposed to stay on
the tree until it fell, and Adam would then have had the credit
of spotting the principle of gravitation.

Much more might be said about pins, touching upon their curious
capacity for disappearing, superstitions concerning them,
usefulness of hatpins or hairpins as