ssed
prohibiting emigration. At that time he was a profligate, having
squandered all his property. But when he found that he could not leave
England he reformed his life. Had he not been detained, who can tell
what the history of Great Britain would have been?

From the careful and persistent accumulation of innumerable facts, each
trivial in itself, but in the aggregate forming a mass of evidence, a
Darwin extracts his law of evolution, and a Linnaeus constructs the
science of botany. A pan of water and two thermometers were the tools
by which Dr. Black discovered latent heat; and a prism, a lens, and a
sheet of pasteboard enabled Newton to unfold the composition of light
and the origin of colors. An eminent foreign savant called on Dr.
Wollaston, and asked to be shown over those laboratories of his in
which science had been enriched by so many great discoveries, when the
doctor took him into a little study, and, pointing to an old tea tray
on the table, on which stood a few watch glasses, test papers, a small
balance, and a blow-pipe, said, "There is my laboratory." A burnt
stick and a barn door served Wilkie in lieu of pencil and paper. A
single potato, carried to England by Sir Walter Raleigh in the
sixteenth century, has multiplied into food for millions, driving
famine from Ireland again and again.

It seemed a small thing to drive William Brewster, John Robinson, and
the poor people of Austerfield and Scrooby into perpetual exile, but as
Pilgrims they became the founders of a mighty people.

A few immortal sentences from Garrison and Phillips, a few poems from
Lowell and Whittier, and the leaven is at work which will not cease its
action until the whipping-post and bodily servitude are abolished
forever.

"For want of a nail the shoe was lost,
For want of a shoe the horse was lost;
For want of a horse the rider was lost, and all,"

says Poor Richard, "for want of a horseshoe nail."

A single remark dropped by an unknown person in the street led to the
successful story of "The Bread-winners." A hymn chanted by the
barefooted friars in the temple of Jupiter at Rome led to the famous
"Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire."

"Words are things" says Byron, "and a small drop of ink, falling like
dew upon a thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps
millions, think."

"I give these books for the founding of a college in this colony"; such
were the words of ten ministers who in the yea