es, working our
mills and manufactories, and driving our steamships and locomotives,
in like manner depends for its supply of power upon so slight an
agency as little drops of water expanded with heat--that familiar
agency called steam, which we see issuing from that common tea-kettle
spout, but which, when pent up within an ingeniously contrived
mechanism, displays a force equal to that of millions of horses, and
contains a power to rebuke the waves and set even the hurricane at
defiance. The same power at work within the bowels of the earth has
been the cause of those volcanoes and earthquakes which have played
so mighty a part in the history of the globe.

This art of seizing opportunities and turning even accidents to
account, bending them to some purpose, is a great secret of success.
Dr. Johnson has defined genius to be "a mind of large general powers
accidentally determined in some particular direction." Men who are
resolved to find a way for themselves, will always find opportunities
enough; and if they do not lie ready to their hand, they will make
them. It is not those who have enjoyed the advantages of colleges,
museums, and public galleries, that have accomplished the most for
science and art; nor have the greatest mechanics and inventors been
trained in mechanics' institutes. Necessity, oftener than facility,
has been the mother of invention; and the most prolific school of all
has been the school of difficulty. Some of the very best workmen have
had the most indifferent tools to work with. But it is not tools that
make the workman, but the trained skill and perseverance of the man
himself. Indeed it is proverbial that the bad workman never yet had a
good tool. Some one asked Opie by that wonderful process he mixed his
colors. "I mix them with my brains, sir," was his reply. It is the
same with every workman who would excel. Ferguson made marvelous
things--such as his wooden clock, that accurately measured the hours--
by means of a common penknife, a tool in everybody's hand; but then
everybody is not a Ferguson. 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 enable Newton to unfold the
composition of light and the origin of colors. An eminent foreign
_savant_ once called upon Dr. Wollaston, and requested to be shown
over his laboratories, in which science had been enriched by so many
important discoveries, when th