260 FACT STRONGER THAN THEORY. 



has been so long delving ? ' What are the peepers ? ' 

 asked the naturalist. ' They are newts, little lizards,' 

 answers a learned pundit. ' 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 philo- 

 sophy of the profoundest theorists, been overthrown by the' 

 simple demonstrations of practical facts ? For a thousand 

 years the world was hi pursuit of the giant power that lay hid- 

 den 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 pro- 

 nounced 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 har- 

 nessed, at first, it still made the great wheel revolve, and 



