agabond that he
was not married, responded: "That's a good thing for your
wife."

A Portuguese mayor enumerated, among the marks by which the
body of a drowned man might be identified when found, "a
marked impediment in his speech."

A Frenchman, contentedly laying his head upon a large stone
jar for a pillow, said it was not hard because he had
previously stuffed it with hay.

An American lecturer solemnly said one evening: "Parents,
you may have children; or, if not, your daughters may have."

Two Scotchmen were discussing the relative merits of
churchyards and cemeteries when one of them boldly expressed
his aversion to the latter in the remark, "I'd raither no
dee ava than be buried in sic a place"; to which his
companion retorted, "Weel, if I'm spared in life an' health,
I'll gang naewhere else."

The Part of Chance in Progress.

Fortunate Accidents Frequently Have Opened the Way to the Discovery of
Important Truths Before the Searchlights of Science and
Invention Were Brought Into Play.

Nature has her own ways of telling her secrets to man, and the commonest
of those ways is what man chooses to call chance or accident. The words
are convenient names and that is about all we know of the phenomena which
they are used to describe.

Below are given the stories of a number of important discoveries made by
accident. Perhaps it will occur to the reader that none of the discoveries
was really accidental, since in each case it was the witnessing of the
accident by an intelligent human being which aroused in the mind of that
human being the train of thought leading to the discovery. An Australian
black might watch a swaying chandelier for ten years, and he would never
discover the pendulum. As a rule, special knowledge is required to make
"discoveries by accident."

But the apparent working of chance in the incidents told here is obvious:

The power of lenses, as applied to the telescope, was
discovered by a watchmaker's apprentice. While holding
spectacle-glasses between his thumb and finger, he was
startled at the suddenly enlarged appearance of a
neighboring church spire.

The art of etching upon glass was discovered by a Nuremberg
glass-cutter. By accident a few drops of aqua fortis fell
upon his spectacles. He noticed that the glass became
corroded and softened where the acid had touched it.