bring to light some principles which we
could hereafter apply to the study of other popular errors. But the
obscurity into which nearly all these enthusiasts have subsided renders
the question easier to ask than to answer. I believe it would have been
found that most of these persons were of ardent temperament and of
considerable imagination, and that their history would show that
Perkinism was not the first nor the last hobby-horse they rode furiously.
Many of them may very probably have been persons of more than common
talent, of active and ingenious minds, of versatile powers and various
acquirements. Such, for instance, was the estimable man to whom I have
repeatedly referred as a warm defender of tractoration, and a bitter
assailant of its enemies. The story tells itself in the biographical
preface to his poem. He went to London with the view of introducing a
hydraulic machine, which he and his Vermont friends regarded as a very
important invention. He found, however, that the machine was already in
common use in that metropolis. A brother Yankee, then in London, had
started the project of a mill, which was to be carried by the water of
the Thames. He was sanguine enough to purchase one fifth of this
concern, which also proved a failure. At about the same period he wrote
the work which proved the great excitement of his mind upon the subject
of the transient folly then before the public. Originally a lawyer, he
was in succession a mechanician, a poet, and an editor, meeting with far
less success in each of these departments than usually attends men of
less varied gifts, but of more tranquil and phlegmatic composition. But
who is ignorant that there is a class of minds characterized by qualities
like those I have mentioned; minds with many bright and even beautiful
traits; but aimless and fickle as the butterfly; that settle upon every
gayly-colored illusion as it opens into flower, and flutter away to
another when the first has dropped its leaves, and stands naked in the
icy air of truth!

Let us now look at the general tenor of the arguments addressed by
believers to sceptics and opponents. Foremost of all, emblazoned at the
head of every column, loudest shouted by every triumphant disputant, held
up as paramount to all other considerations, stretched like an
impenetrable shield to protect the weakest advocate of the great cause
against the weapons of the adversary, was that omnipotent monosyllable
which has been