ing work.

It is the intelligent eye of the careful observer which gives these
apparently trivial phenomena their value. So trifling a matter as the
sight of seaweed floating past his ship, enabled Columbus to quell
the mutiny which arose amongst his sailors at not discovering land,
and to assure them that the eagerly sought New World was not far off.

It is the close observation of little things which is the secret of
success in business, in art, in science, and in every pursuit in
life. Human knowledge is but an accumulation of small facts, made by
successive generations of men, the little bits of knowledge and
experience carefully treasured up by them growing at length into a
mighty pyramid. Though many of these facts and observations seemed in
the first instance to have but slight significance, they are all
found to have their eventual uses, and to fit into their proper
places. Even many speculations seemingly remote, turn out to be the
basis of results the most obviously practical. In the case of the
conic sections discovered by Apollonius Pergaeus, twenty centuries
elapsed before they were made the basis of astronomy--a science which
enables the modern navigator to steer his way through unknown seas
and traces for him in the heavens an unerring path to his appointed
haven. And had not mathematicians toiled for so long, and, to
uninstructed observers, apparently so fruitlessly, over the abstract
relations of lines and surfaces, it is probably that but few of our
mechanical inventions would have seen the light.

When Franklin made his discovery of the identity of lightning and
electricity, it was sneered at, and people asked, "Of what use is
it?" To which his reply was, "What is the use of a child? It may
become a man!" When Galvani discovered that a frog's leg twitched
when placed in contact with different metals, it could scarcely have
been imagined that so apparently insignificant a fact could have led
to important results. Yet therein lay the germ of the electric
telegraph, which binds the intelligence of continents together, and,
probably before many years have elapsed will "put a girdle round the
globe." So, too, little bits of stone and fossil, dug out of the
earth, intelligently interpreted, have issued in the science of
geology and the practical operations of mining, in which large
capitals are invested and vast numbers of persons profitably
employed.

The gigantic machinery employed in pumping our min