daily greater and greater, man obtains a wider and wider dominion over the forces of nature, and thus by the application of mind to matter will he, in the language of Carlyle, "achieve the final undisputed prostration of Force under Thought, of Animal courage under Spiritual.”

Eyes That See.

"F

REV. WILLARD E. WATERBURY, B.D.

Pastor Belmont Avenue Baptist Church, Springfield, Mass.

OR I am fearfully and wonderfully made; marvelous are thy works." As I write, my eye takes in the paper before me, then the various objects in the room, in their form, color, direction, and distance. I next look from my window and see the dwellings, factories, business blocks, and church spires, and the hills stretching far away into the dim distance, while over all the clouds, like phantom ships, go sailing in the sea of blue. All these things I take knowledge of by means of a little spherical mechanism less than an inch in diameter. The objects on my desk or about the room I may touch and handle; the far-away hills with their mottled coverings of forests and snow I also touch, though not with the hand. I cannot go to them except by a journey of many hours, but I open my eyes and they are brought to me on the wings of light. Yes, I find they have been knocking at the curtain of my window with the coming of the dawn, and when I close my eyes for a day dream they are gently tapping at the closed portals, and wait to reveal unto me their mingled majesty and beauty.

Eyes that see,-" The eye sees what it brings means of seeing. To Newton and his dog Diamond, what a different pair of universes!" And many a man goes through life with open eyes indeed, but with a brain behind the eye so sluggish that he sees little more than does the dumb brute by his side. The eye is, after all, but an instrument of the brain, and what we urge is that the brain be taught to use with more skill this delicate mechanism. We need educated eyes, trained powers of perception and reproduction. Walk through the

streets of the city with a companion, look at the same show window for an instant, and then ascertain which can give the fuller account of what he has seen. The eye is capable of being trained to a process of instantaneous photography, which will afford both pleasure and profit to the possessor.

As children we begin with laboriously grasping a word at a time in silent reading, and some never get beyond that stage; others gain power to read a line at a time; still others are known to have attained such proficiency as to grasp the thoughts expressed on an ordinary book page at two or three glances. These readers are not necessarily superficial, nor indeed do they always read at this rate, any more than one who is swift of foot always runs. But we have possibilities of development, which, if brought out, would add greatly to the sum total of our worth.

The difference between the success of this one and the failure of that one, is often simply in the use of the eyes. One sees and seizes that at which the other but idly glances. The successful man indeed sees more than the facts or objects which come under his notice. He sees them as doors of opportunity which wait to be pushed open and give him access to something better beyond. In reading the lives of inventors and discoverers we often come to this expression, "He noticed that-" and then follows the account of how some commonplace thing, which others had repeatedly passed around or stumbled over, became his stepping-stone to success.

The opening of the mouth of the Mississippi by Captain J. B. Eads is a case to the point. The great river is constantly bringing down great quantities of sand and mud, which gradually fill up the mouths of the stream. The sand bar thus formed had so increased that it finally blocked up the passage to such an extent that large and heavily loaded ships could pass over it only with the greatest difficulty. On one occasion over fifty vessels were seen lying north of the bar, waiting for an opportunity to get to sea. Sometimes they were delayed for days or even weeks, and were obliged to be at great expense

for steam tugboats to haul them through. The national government and the state of Louisiana had expended millions of money trying to remove the obstruction, with but partial and poor success. Captain Eads noticed that where the river was narrow the current was strong, and so deposited but little mud to fill up the channel, and he was convinced that by building new banks on each side near the mouth of the river, thus narrowing and greatly increasing the velocity of the stream, the mud and sand would be swept out to sea. And then if the bar were dredged out it would not form again.

Congress was slow to give consent for trying the experiment, as nearly all the civil and military engineers opposed it. But finally permission was given and Captain Eads set about his task, and in four years what he had seen in possibility others saw in realization, so that now large ocean steamers pass up to New Orleans or out to sea without difficulty. Two millions of dollars per year are thus saved, and the commercial importance of New Orleans has been greatly increased.

We must not suppose that discoveries and inventions are ordinarily the result of chance. We are correct in saying of discoverers and inventors, "they noticed," but we should be far from the truth in saying, "they happened to notice." They noticed because they had cultivated their powers of observation, they had eyes that saw. What seemed a stroke of luck to their fellows was in fact a result of pluck in going through the world with eyes open rather than sauntering on in dreamy idleness. Sir Isaac Newton worked out the statement of the law of gravitation, and discovered that the same force that caused the apple to fall from the tree in his mother's orchard kept the moon in its orbit. Other men had seen apples fall and the moon move onward in the heavens, but he was the first to see the connection between them. While in the University of Cambridge he was so close a student that he often sat up the entire night working on some difficult mathematical problem, and in the morning would seem to be as much refreshed with his success as though the hours had been given to sleep. It

was in the summer of 1665, while at home, that, seated in the orchard and seeing the ripe fruit drop, he fell into one of his profound meditations on the nature of the force which caused it to fall. The train of thought seemed to have been something like this: 1. These apples fall in a direct line toward the center of the earth. The same force causes a cannon ball to curve toward the same point. Everything in the world is drawn and held by it. 2. If these apples fell from a tree half a mile high they would not the less seek the earth's center. 3. Suppose an apple should fall from the moon-then what? He saw that the movement of the moon in its orbit around the earth is really a constant falling toward the earth; that it is constantly drawn by the earth from a straight line in which it would move by its own momentum, were it not for the attraction of the earth. But not until 1682 did he complete the problem, and give to the world the solution.

For true success there must be not only the general powers of observation, but a specialized training of those powers, so that we shall be searching for our specialty. Yonder stand three men upon a hilltop. The first is a dealer in real estate. His trained eye enables him to estimate the fertility of those broad acres in the valley, and the value of those forest-covered slopes, or the possibilities of making the sightly eminence upon which they stand a suburban settlement, where men may build homes away from the noise and smoke of the city. The next is a geologist. His eye takes in the nature of the soil, the rock formations, the scattered bowlders, the outlines of hills and valleys and courses of rivers, and he sees how through unmeasured ages the forces of nature have been bringing to its present form the region of country which is spread out at his feet. The third is a painter. For the possibilities and utilities of the valleys and hillsides, or the processes by which they came to their present form, he cares but little. He looks with an artist's eye, and his soul swells with an artist's joy, and he longs to capture for his canvas these valleys of verdure, the river which like a silver ribbon seems carelessly thrown down