alist. 'They are newts, little lizards,' answers a learned
pandit. 'They are spirits of the bog, myths, that hold their carnival
in the early grass of the marshy pools,' says the theorist and poet,
who _believes_ in the idealities of a poetic fancy. 'They are frogs,'
says a third, who is ready to chop any amount of logic in favor of his
system of frogology, and hereupon columns of argument, and pages of
learned discussion, have been held over the identity of the jolly
peepers of the spring-time.

"But you discarded logic, threw away argument, and came down to the
sure demonstrations of sober fact. You watched by the marshy pool, and
caught the 'peeper' in the act, took him '_in flagrante, delicto_,' as
the lawyers say, and thus ended the theoretical discussion about the
'peepers.' You placed another fixed fact upon the page of
natural history.

"And how often has the wisdom of the schools, the philosophy of the
profoundest theorists, been overthrown by the simple demonstrations of
practical facts? For a thousand years the world was in pursuit of the
giant power that lay hidden in heated vapor, the steam that came
floating up from boiling water. That power eluded the grasp and
baffled the research of human genius, which was looking so earnestly
after it, until ingenuity gave it up, and philosophy pronounced it a
delusion. Not far from the beginning of the present century, practical
experiment began to develop the mysterious power of steam. Rudely and
imperfectly harnessed, at first, it still made the great wheel
revolve, and men talked about making it a great motor for mechanical
purposes. Philosophy volunteered its demonstrations of the absolute
impossibility of such a thing. Still human ingenuity felt its way
carefully onward, until the great fact was developed, that steam was
in truth capable of moving machinery, was endowed almost with
vitality, and could be made to throw the shuttle and spin. Ingenious
men hinted that it might be made to propel water-craft in the place of
wind and sails, and thus be harnessed into the service of commerce, as
it had already been into that of manufactures. Here again philosophy
interposed its axioms, and declared the scheme among the wild vagaries
of a distempered fancy. But years rolled on, and the tall ship that
swung out upon the broad ocean, and moved forward when the air was
still and calmness was on the face of the deep, forward in the eye of
the wind--forward in the teeth of