stone came here and gave an address on the founding
of the Wedgwood Memorial Institute.

Among other things said in the course of his speech was this: "Then
comes the well-known smallpox, the settling of the dregs of the disease
in the lower part of the leg, and the eventual amputation of the limb,
rendering him lame for life. It is not often that we have such palpable
occasion to record our obligations to calamity. But in the wonderful
ways of Providence, that disease which came to him as a twofold scourge
was probably the occasion of his subsequent excellence. It prevented him
from growing up to be the active, vigorous workman, possessed of all his
limbs, and knowing right well the use of them; but it put him upon
considering whether, as he could not be that, he might not be something
else, and something greater. It sent his mind inward; it drove him to
meditate upon the laws and secrets of his art. The result was that he
arrived at a perception and grasp of them which might, perhaps, have
been envied, certainly have been owned, by an Athenian potter.
Relentless criticism has long since torn to pieces the old legend of
King Numa receiving in a cavern, from the nymph of Egeria, the laws
which were to govern Rome. But no criticism can shake the record of that
illness and that mutilation of the boy Josiah Wedgwood, which made a
cavern of his bedroom, and an oracle of his own inquiring, searching,
meditative mind."

You remember how that great and good man, Richard Maurice Bucke, once
said, "After I had lost my feet in the Rocky Mountain avalanche, I lay
for six weeks in a cabin, and having plenty of time to think it over, I
concluded that, now my feet were gone, I surely could no longer depend
upon them, so I must use my head." And he did.

The loss of an arm in a sawmill was the pivotal point that gave us one
of the best and strongest lawyers in Western New York. And heaven knows
we need good lawyers: the other kind are so plentiful!

Gladstone thought it was smallpox that drove Josiah Wedgwood to books
and art. But other men have had the smallpox--bless me!--and they never
acquired much else.

Josiah kept Thomson's "Seasons" three months, and then returned it to
Sarah Wedgwood, with a letter addressing her as "Dear Cousin." You will
find it set down in most of the encyclopedias that she was his cousin,
but this seems to be because writers of encyclopedias are literalists,
and lovers are poets.

Josiah said he re