My favorite story remains the one about the Marquis de Puysegur and his magnetized elm tree (starting in the fourth paragraph). Also the illustration, not reproduced online, called "Law in a Car Drawn by Cocks." It actually refers to John Law, but by title alone it might just as well refer to the "but what do they care?" thread.

Same emotional tropes, new props.

The mid-19th-Century scams involving steam engines that ran without coal (the sinister coal interests were covering up the fact that water vapor could be created without heat!) are a lot like current-days scams involving zero-point energy, cold fusion, "gyromass" power and the like.

I've been considering picking this up for a while. It's lovely to have a place to check out the language and readability (and overlap with the rest of my library) of something this old before investing in the shelf space.