MODERN RESEARCH FOB THE PRACTICAL. 



is a laggard, a speed that annihilates alike space and time. 

 Men looked into a mirror, and seeing their own counterpart, 

 a fac-simik of themselves reflected there, began to ask, 

 ' Why may not that shadow be fixed ; fastened in some 

 way, to remain upon the polished surface that gives it back, 

 even after the original may be mouldering in the grave ? ' 

 Here again philosophy laid its finger upon its nose, and 

 winked facetiously, as if it had found a new subject for ridi- 

 cule, in the stupendous folly of such an inquiry. But from 

 that simple question, rose up the Daguerreian art ; an art 

 which fixes upon metallic plates, upon paper, the shadow of a 

 man, of palace and cottage, of mountain and field, giving 

 thus a picture ten thousand times truer to nature than the 

 pencil of the cunningest artist. These and a thousand other 

 mighty triumphs of human ingenuity have fought their way 

 onward to their present position, against the fogyism of 

 philosophy, the inertia of the schoolmen. They have been 

 the sequence of cold, resistless demonstrations of experiment 

 and fact. The world would stand still but for the spirit of 

 research for the practical ; for experimental, and not theo- 

 retical knowledge, that is abroad. It is this spirit that moves 

 the world in all its present matchless career of progress, and 

 distinguishes our era above all others of the world's exist- 

 ence. You may be thankful, my friend, that you have been" 

 able to add another fixed fact to the stock of human know- 

 ledge, even though it be only that the ' peeper ' is a frog, 

 and not a ' newt ' or a ' myth.' 



" But who would suppose that such a tiny little frogling 



