een
called a public benefactor who makes two blades of grass grow where
one grew before. He is as great a benefactor, who in an age of
verbiage makes one word perform the function of two. Wonderful is the
precision with which this mental mechanism may be made to work. Some
men can even think their best on their feet in the presence of a great
assembly. There are others whose spontaneous thoughts move by informal
syllogisms. Emmons sometimes laid off his common utterances like the
heads of a discourse. Johnson's retorts exploded like a musket, and
often struck like a musket-ball. John Hunter fairly compared his own
mind to a bee-hive, all in a hum, but the hum of industry and order
and achievement. It reminds us, by contrast, of other minds formed
upon the model of the wasp's nest, with a superabundance of hum and
sting without, and no honey within. It was of the voluminous works of
a distinguished author that Robert Hall remarked,--'They are a
continent of mud, sir.' Nuisances of literature are the men who fill
the air with smoke, relieved by no clear blaze of light. There have
been schools of thought that were as smoky as Pittsburg. We have had
'seers' who made others see nothing, men of 'insight' with no outlook,
scientists who in every critical argument jumped the track of true
science, and preachers whose hazy thoughts and utterances flickered
between truth and error. Pity there were not some intellectual
Sing-Sing for the culprit!

"How refreshing, on the other hand, to follow the clear unfolding of
the silken threads of thought that lie side by side, single and in
knots and skeins, but never tangled. What a beautiful process was an
investigation by Faraday in electro-magnetism, as he combined his
apparatus, manipulated his material, narrowed his search, eliminated
his sources of error, and drew his careful conclusions. With similar
persistent acuteness, in the field of Biblical investigation, how does
Zumpt, by an exhaustive exclusion and combination, at length make the
annals of Tacitus shake hands with the gospel of Luke over the taxing
of Cyrenius. In metaphysics, how matchless the razor-like acuteness
with which Hamilton could distinguish, divide, and clear up the
questions that lay piled in confused heaps over the subject of
perception. What can be more admirable than the workings of the
trained legal or rather judicial mind, as it walks firmly through
labyrinths of statute and precedent and principle, holdi