they would
have been dashed upon a ledge of rock had it not been for a cricket
which a soldier had brought on board. When the little insect scented
the land, it broke its long silence by a shrill note, and this warned
them of their danger.

"Strange that a little thing like that should cause a man so much
pain!" exclaimed a giant, as he rolled in his hand and examined with
eager curiosity the acorn which his friend the dwarf had obligingly
taken from the huge eye into which it had fallen just as the colossus
was on the point of shooting a bird perched in the branches of an oak.

Sometimes a conversation, or a sentence in a letter, or a paragraph in
an article, will help us to reproduce the whole character of the
author; as a single bone, a fish scale, a fin, or a tooth, will enable
the scientist and anatomist to reproduce the fish or the animal,
although extinct for ages.

By gnawing through a dike, even a rat may drown a nation. A little boy
in Holland saw water trickling from a small hole near the bottom of a
dike. He realized that the leak would rapidly become larger if the
water was not checked, so he held his hand over the hole for hours on a
dark and dismal night until he could attract the attention of
passers-by. His name is still held in grateful remembrance in Holland.

The beetling chalk cliffs of England were built by rhizopods, too small
to be clearly seen without the aid of a magnifying-glass.

What was so unlikely as that throwing an empty wine-flask in the fire
should furnish the first notion of a locomotive, or that the sickness
of an Italian chemist's wife and her absurd craving for reptiles for
food should begin the electric telegraph?

Madame Galvani noticed the contraction of the muscles of a skinned frog
which was accidentally touched at the moment her husband took a spark
from an electrical machine. She gave the hint which led to the
discovery of galvanic electricity, now so useful in the arts and in
transmitting vocal or written language.

M. Louis Pasteur was usher in the Lyceum. Thursdays he took the boys
to walk. A student took his microscope to examine insects, and allowed
Pasteur to look through it. This was the starting of the boy on the
microscopic career which has made men wonder. He was almost wild with
enthusiasm at the new world which the microscope revealed.

A stamp act to raise 60,000 pounds produced the American Revolution, a
war that cost 100,000,000 pounds. What