n the education of ingenious
children, we should gradually turn their attention from curious
trifles to important objects. Boverick,[57] who made chains "to yoke a
flea," must have possessed exquisite patience; besides his chain of
two hundred links, with its padlock and key, all weighing together
less than the third part of a grain, this indefatigable _minute
artificer_ was the maker of a landau, which opened and shut by
springs: this equipage, with six horses harnessed to it, a coachman
sitting on the box, with a dog between his legs, four inside and two
outside passengers, besides a postilion riding one of the fore horses,
was drawn with all the ease and safety imaginable by a well trained
flea! The inventor and executor of this puerile machine, bestowed on
it, probably, as much time as would have sufficed to produce Watt's
fire engine, or Montgolfier's balloon. It did not, perhaps, cost the
Marquis of Worcester more exertion to draw out his celebrated century
of inventions; it did not, perhaps, cost Newton more to write those
queries which Maclaurin said he could never read without feeling his
hair stand on end with admiration.

Brebeuf, a French wit, wrote a hundred and fifty epigrams upon a
painted lady; a brother wit, fired with emulation, wrote upon the same
subject three hundred more, making in all four hundred and fifty
epigrams, each with appropriate turns of their own. Probably, Pope and
Parnell did not rack their invention so much, or exercise more
industry in completing "The Rape of the Lock," or "The Rise of Woman."
These will live for ever; who will read the four hundred and fifty
epigrams?

The most effectual methods to discourage in young people the taste for
frivolous ingenuity, will be, never to admire these "laborious
nothings," to compare them with useful and elegant inventions, and to
show that vain curiosities can be but the wonder and amusement of a
moment. Children who begin with trifling inventions, may be led from
these to general principles; and with their knowledge, their ambition
will necessarily increase. It cannot be expected that the most
enlarged plan of education could early give an intimate acquaintance
with all the sciences; but with their leading principles, their
general history, their present state, and their immediate
desiderata,[58] young people may, and ought to be, made acquainted.
Their own industry will afterwards collect more precise information,
and they will never was