Napoleon, who feared not to attack
the proudest monarchs in their capitols, shrank from the political
influence of one independent woman in private life, Madame de Stael.
Had not Scott sprained his foot his life would probably have taken a
different direction.

Cromwell was about to sail for America when a law was passed
prohibiting emigration. At that time he was a profligate, having
squandered all his property. But when he found that he could not leave
England he reformed his life. Had he not been detained who can tell
what the history of Great Britain would have been?

When one of his friends asked Scopas the Thessalian for something that
could be of little use to him, he answered, "It is in these useless and
superfluous things that I am rich and happy."

It was the little foxes that spoiled the vines in Solomon's day. Mites
play mischief now with our meal and cheese, moths with our woolens and
furs, and mice in our pantries. More than half our diseases are
produced by infinitesimal creatures called microbes.

Most people call fretting a minor fault, a foible, and not a vice.
There is no vice except drunkenness which can so utterly destroy the
peace, the happiness, of a home.

"We call the large majority of human lives obscure," says Bulwer,
"presumptuous that we are! How know we what lives a single thought
retained from the dust of nameless graves may have lighted to renown?"

The theft of a diamond necklace from a French queen convulsed Europe.
From the careful and persistent accumulation of innumerable facts, each
trivial in itself, but in the aggregate forming a mass of evidence, a
Darwin extracts his law of evolution, and Linnaeus constructs the
science of botany. 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 enabled Newton to unfold the composition of light
and the origin of colors. An eminent foreign savant called on Dr.
Wollaston, and asked to be shown over those laboratories of his in
which science had been enriched by so many great discoveries, when the
doctor took him into a little study, and, pointing to an old tea tray
on the table, on which stood a few watch glasses, test papers, a small
balance, and a blow-pipe, said, "There is my laboratory." A burnt
stick and a barn door served Wilkie in lieu of pencil and paper. A
single potato, carried to England by Sir Walter Raleigh in the
sixteenth cen