ature achieves her gifts only through vast expenditures.

It is said that each of the new guns for the navy costs $100,000. But
the gun survives only a hundred explosions, so that every shot costs
$1,000. Tyndall tells us that each drop of water sheathes electric
power sufficient to charge 100,000 Leyden jars and blow the Houses of
Parliament to atoms. Farraday amazes us by his statement of the energy
required to embroider a violet or produce a strawberry. To untwist the
sunbeam and extract the rich strawberry red, to refine the sugar, and
mix its flavor, represents heat sufficient to run an engine from
Liverpool to London or from Chicago to Detroit. But because nature
does her work noiselessly we must not forget that each of her gifts
also involves tremendous expenditure.

This law of vicarious service holds equally in the intellectual world.
The author buys his poem or song with his life-blood. While traveling
north from London midst a heavy snow-storm, Lord Bacon descended from
his coach to stuff a fowl with snow to determine whether or not ice
would preserve flesh. With his life the philosopher purchased for us
the principle that does so much to preserve our fruits and foods
through the summer's heat and lend us happiness and comfort. And
Pascal, whose thoughts are the seeds that have sown many a mental life
with harvests, bought his splendid ideas by burning up his brain. The
professors who guided and loved him knew that the boy would soon be
gone, just as those who light a candle in the evening know that the
light, burning fast, will soon flicker out in the deep socket. One of
our scientists foretells the time when, by the higher mathematics, it
will be possible to compute how many brain cells must be torn down to
earn a given sum of money; how much vital force each Sir William Jones
must give in exchange for one of his forty languages and dialects; what
percentage of the original vital force will be consumed in experiencing
each new pleasure, or surmounting each new pain; how much nerve
treasure it takes to conquer each temptation or endure each
self-sacrifice. Too often society forgets that the song, law or reform
has cost the health and life of the giver. Tradition says that,
through much study, the Iliad cost Homer his eyes. There is strange
meaning in the fact that Dante's face was plowed deep with study and
suffering and written all over with the literature of sorrow.

To gain his vision of th