LITTLE 

 JOURNEYS 



This action proved to be a pivotal point in his life. 

 C(" Whether other people really teach us anything, is a 

 question," says Stanley Hall, "but they do sometimes 

 give us impulses, and make us find out for ourselves." 

 QRicci made Galileo find out for himself. From Plato, 

 he turned to Archimedes. Geometry became a passion, 

 and a wise man has told us that we never accomplish 

 anything, either good or bad, without passion. Passion 

 means one hundred pounds of steam on the boiler, 

 with love sitting on the safety-valve, when the blow- 

 off is set for fifty. It surely is risky business, I will 

 admit; accidents occasionally occur and explosions 

 sometimes happen, but everything is risky, even life, 

 since few get out of it alive. And so, to drop back to 

 the original proposition, nothing great and sublime is 

 ever done without passion. 



Galileo had had his mechanical whooping-cough, mu- 

 sical mumps, artistic measles, and now the hectic 

 flush of mathematics burned on his cheeks. He talked 

 and dreamed mathematics. Euclid was in the saddle. 

 QRicci became interested in the talented young scholar, 

 and remained longer at Pisa than he had intended, 

 that they might sit up all night and surprise the rising 

 sun, discussing the beauties of dimensions and the 

 wonders of dynamics. 



Together they went to Florence, where Ricci intro- 

 duced his pupil as a pedagogic sample of the goods, 

 just as Booker Washington usually takes with him on 

 his travels a few ebony homo bricks as specimens from 

 Tuskegee Jt> & 

 42 



