A moonlit, nervous, and short-sighted Theosophist asks, "What is that misty white thing over there?  Is it a ghost, or a Mahatma, or an Astral Body?"  From Pick Me Up, 1892.

"Woman rents services and vacuum sweeper by hour."  From Popular Mechanics, 1920.

Our custom widget that checks for duplicated images suggested this unlikely pairing.  Click each image for its source.

From English Illustrated, 1903.

"When I see [a word like ennui, sacrilegious, gunwale, or parabola] coming I have to step hastily into an open quotation or a split infinitive and wait until it disappears around the corner" (Hinton Gilmore in Cartoons Magazine, 1919.  Illustration by Robert Lemen).

Here are a couple of epidemics from Fun magazine, 1885.

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"Only time would reveal Venus' future" (John Joseph Burhop, Rise of the Kek, 2012).  Our illustration is from El Mundo Físico by A. Guillemin, 1882.

From Bewick's Fables, 1820.

"The road we travel."  From 1913.

From Eggs: Facts and Fancies About Them by Anna Barrows, 1890.

Here's a yew at the center of a labyrinth (Cassell's, 1896), but recall that "You [like the yew] are at the center of the maze" (Howard A. Sherman, The First Mile, 2005).

From Idea de un Principe Politico Christiano, 1642.

Roosevelt devours submarines in Die Muskete, 1917.

Here's a precursor to Cruella de Vil, over half a century before Dodie Smith's 1956 novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians.  From Jugend, 1900.

Can you make out the Dickens quotation that serves as the motto?  There was a time when even so-called pseudo-science sought nothing but "facts, facts, facts."  Today, we're hard pressed to name any institution that could in good faith adopt such a motto.  The media?  Political pollsters?  Climatologists?  Any other white-coat wearer of what Robert Anton Wilson dubbed the New Inquisition?  Selections from the Papers of the Phasmatological Society, 1882.