a landing
facilitated on a dangerous surf, by this solitary meditation of genius.

Thus meditation draws out of the most simple truths the strictness
of philosophical demonstration, converting even the amusements of
school-boys, or the most ordinary domestic occurrences, into the principle
of a new science. The phenomenon of galvanism was familiar to students;
yet was there but one man of genius who could take advantage of an
accident, give it his name, and fix it as a science. It was while lying in
his bath, but still meditating on the means to detect the fraud of the
goldsmith who had made Hiero's crown, that the most extraordinary
philosopher of antiquity was led to the investigation of a series of
propositions demonstrated in the two books of ARCHIMEDES, _De insidentibus
in fluido,_ still extant; and which a great mathematician admires both for
the strictness and elegance of the demonstrations. To as minute a domestic
occurrence as GALVANI'S we owe the steam-engine. When the Marquis of
WORCESTER was a State prisoner in the Tower, he one day observed, while
his meal was preparing in his apartment, that the cover of the vessel
being tight, was, by the expansion of the steam, suddenly forced off, and
driven up the chimney. His inventive mind was led on in a train of thought
with reference to the practical application of steam as a first mover. His
observations, obscurely exhibited in his "Century of Inventions," were
successively wrought out by the meditations of others, and an incident, to
which one can hardly make a formal reference without a risible emotion,
terminated in the noblest instance of mechanical power.

Into the stillness of meditation the mind of genius must be frequently
thrown; it is a kind of darkness which hides from us all surrounding
objects, even in the light of day. This is the first state of existence in
genius. In Cicero's "Treatise on Old Age," we find Cato admiring Caius
Sulpitius Gallus, who, when he sat down to write in the morning, was
surprised by the evening; and when he took up his pen in the evening, was
surprised by the appearance of the morning. SOCRATES sometimes remained a
whole day in immovable meditation, his eyes and countenance directed to
one spot, as if in the stillness of death. LA FONTAINE, when writing his
comic tales, has been observed early in the morning and late in the
evening in the same recumbent posture under the same tree. This quiescent
state is a sort of enthusia