essful experiments in
mesmerism and spiritualism, and have always succeeded in making the
failure they desired.

Voltaire remarks, and Playfair confirms it as a fact, "that though the
author of the _Principia_ survived the publication of that great work
nearly forty years, he had not at the time of his death, twenty
followers out of England."

If educated bigotry could thus resist the mathematical demonstrations
of Newton, and the physical demonstrations of Harvey, has human nature
sufficiently advanced to induce us to expect much better results from
the colleges of to-day--from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the rest?
If such a change has occurred, I have not discovered it.

Neglect and opposition has ever been the lot of the original explorer
of nature. Kepler, the greatest astronomical genius of his time,
continually struggled with poverty, and earned a scanty subsistence by
casting astrological nativities.

Eustachius, who in the 16th century discovered the Eustachian tube and
the valves of the heart, was about 200 years in advance of his time,
but was unable, from poverty, to publish his anatomical tables, which
were published by Lancisi 140 years later, in 1714.

Not only in science do we find this stolid indifference or active
hostility to new ideas, but in matters of the simplest character and
most obvious utility. For example, this country is now enjoying the
benefits of fish culture, but why did we not enjoy it a hundred years
ago? The process was discovered by the Count De Goldstein in the last
century, and was published by the Academy of Sciences, and also fully
illustrated by a German named Jacobi, who applied it to breeding trout
and salmon. This seems to have been forgotten until in 1842 two
obscure and illiterate fishermen rediscovered and practised this
process. The French government was attracted by the success of these
fisherman, Gehin and Remy, and thus the lost art was revived.

Even so simple an invention as the percussion cap, invented in 1807,
was not introduced in the British army until after the lapse of thirty
years.

The founder of the kindergarten system, Friedrich FROEBEL, is one of
the benefactors of humanity. How narrowly did he escape from total
failure and oblivion.

The "Reminiscences of Frederich Froebel," translated from the German
of the late Mrs. Mary Mann, gives an interesting account of his life
and labors, upon which the following notice is based:

"Froebel died i