ciple of gravity was discovered,
replied: 'By always thinking of it.'

When Watt, as a boy, was engaged in investigating the condensation of
steam, his aunt, who was sitting with him at the tea-table, exclaimed:

'James, I never saw such an idle boy! Take a book or employ yourself
usefully. For the last half hour you have not spoken a word, but taken
off the lid of that kettle and put it on again, holding now a cup and
now a silver spoon over the steam, watching how it rises from the spout,
and counting the drops of water.'

In this sympathetic way children are usually encouraged to think by
their elders. Watt's faculties were developed entirely at home. He was
sent to a public elementary school in Scotland; but, fortunately for
science, he was so delicate that he was nearly always absent through
indisposition. A visitor, who found the boy drawing lines and circles on
the hearth with a piece of coloured chalk, once remonstrated with Mr.
James Watt, senior, for allowing his son to waste his time at home. Watt
had the good fortune, however, to possess an intelligent father, who
encouraged the boy as far as it lay in his power.

Left to his own devices, Watt not only contrived to make himself the
foremost engineer of his time, but he also developed his talents in many
other directions. Sir Walter Scott says of him that 'his talents and
fancy overflowed on every subject.' And M. Arago, the French scientist,
in his memoir of Watt, expresses the view that the latter, in spite of
his excellent memory, 'might, nevertheless, not have peculiarly
distinguished himself among the youthful prodigies of ordinary schools.
He could never have learned his lessons like a parrot, for he
experienced a necessity of carefully elaborating the intellectual
elements presented to his attention, and Nature had peculiarly endowed
him with the faculty of meditation.'

This is only a roundabout way of saying that the conventional process of
cramming would have destroyed the fine intellectual faculties possessed
by Watt. But if in his case, why not in that of another? That is the
strange thing about the light shed upon educational problems by cases
like that of Watt, Newton, and other men of commanding genius. People
only perceive in it a half-truth. They think that it is only in these
exceptional instances that the mind is incapable of being developed by
ordinary rough-and-ready methods.

Upon what grounds is such an absurd deduction founded? I