And he whispers to men of those hills he sees
In the blush of the golden west;
And they look to the light of his lifted eye
And they hate the name of rest.
In the light of that eye doth the slave behold
A hope that is high and brave,
And the madness of war comes into his blood
For he knows himself a slave.
The serfs of wrong in the light of that eye
March on with victorious songs;
For the strength of their right comes into their hearts
When they behold their wrongs.
'Tis by the light of that lifted eye
That error's mists are rent—
A guide to the table-land of Truth
Is the Angel of Discontent.
And still he looks with his lifted eye,
And his glance is far away
On a light that shines on the glimmering hills
Of a diviner day. (Text.)
(783)
Discourtesy—See Bargain-making.
DISCOVERY, ACCIDENTAL
Blotting-paper was discovered purely by
accident. Some ordinary paper was being
made one day at a mill in Berkshire when
a careless workman forgot to put in the
sizing material. It may be imagined what
angry scenes would take place in that mill,
as the whole of the paper made was regarded
as being quite useless. The proprietor
of the mill desired to write a note
shortly afterward, and he took a piece of
waste paper, thinking it was good enough
for the purpose. To his intense annoyance,
the ink spread all over the paper. All of a
sudden there flashed over his mind the
thought that this paper would do instead of
sand for drying ink, and he at once advertised
his waste paper as "blotting."
There was such a big demand that the mill ceased to make ordinary paper and was soon occupied making blotting only, the use of which spread to all countries. The result now is that the descendant of the discoverer owns the largest mills in the world for the manufacture of the special kind of paper. The reason the paper is of use in drying ink is that really it is a mass of hair-like tubes, which suck up liquid by capillary attraction. If a very fine glass tube is put into water the liquid will rise in it owing to capillary attraction. The art of manufacturing blotting-paper has been carried to such a degree that the product has wonderful absorbent qualities.—Boston Herald.
(784)
Whether this story be true or legendary, it is a fact that many great discoveries have been the result of happy accident; or, as the Christian will prefer to say, the result of Providence:
It is said that the two Jansen boys had
placed the spectacle lenses, with which they
were playing, at the proper distances apart
and were looking through them at the
weather-cock on the top of a distant church
steeple. They were surprized at discovering
two things; first, that the weather-cock appeared
upside down; and, second, it could
be seen much more distinctly through the
glasses than with the naked eye. Of course,
they called the attention of their father to
this curious discovery. Jansen, who was an
intelligent man, and well acquainted with the
properties of lenses as they were known at
that early time, constructed a telescope based
on the discovery of his sons.—Edwin J.
Houston, "The Wonder-book of Light."
(785)
DISCOVERY, BENEFITS FROM
In the development of mineral resources
and in manufactures, higher education is
paying even larger proportionate returns than
in agriculture. Practically the entire $2,000,000,000
yearly mineral production of the
United States is directly due to a few chemical
and electrical processes which were
worked out by highly educated scientists.
For example, the cyanide process of extracting
gold, worked out in the laboratory
in 1880 by McArthur and Forrest, is responsible
for fully one-third of the world's gold
production, making possible the five million
annual production of the Homestake mine in
North Dakota and the one hundred and
forty-five million of South Africa, and many
other similar cases. The Elkinton electrolytic
process of refining copper is in the same way
used now in producing 700,000,000 pounds of
copper annually in the United States. The
Bessemer and the open-hearth processes of
producing steel, by which nearly all of our
23,000,000 tons are produced annually, are
due to the scientific researches of Sir Henry
Bessemer, of Thomas and Gilchrist, and of
