Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 10.djvu/412

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��Inventors as Martyrs to Science.

��tic as whale-bone, or as rigid as flint, tuuates the description will apply of But the inventor was the slave of his the father in the Schonberg Cotta pursuit, and it proved fatal. His family. ''Our father is the wisest last labors were given to life-saving man I ever saw. He talks about apparatus. Reading that twenty per- more things that I cannot understand sons perished by drowning every hour, than any one else I know. He is also he could neither rest nor sleep. He a great inventor (with a capital I), felt he was the man to save them. He thouglit of the plan of printing Almost to the last day of his life, sal- books before any one else, and had low, emaciated, and feeble, he was almost completed the invention before busy with new applications of his dis- any press was set up. And he always coverv. After twenty-seven years of believed there was another world on labor, after having founded a new the other side of the great sea, long branch of industiy, which gave em- before the Admiral Christopher Co- ploymeut to sixty thousand persons, lumbus discovered America. The he died insolvent, leaving a wife and only misfortune has been that some six children only an iulieritauce of one else has always stepped in debt. After his death unscrupulous just before he had completed his in- men, who had plundered him while vention, when nothing but some little living, opposed an extension of his insignificant detail was wanting to The sweet-spirited, silver-haired off all the credit and profit. It is Froebel, founder of the Kindergaten this which has kept us from becoming system, is one of the latest martyrs, rich. If the mother laments a little On a sunny plain, with happy chil- over the fame that might have been dren dancing round him, he was con- his, or sighs a little over the scanty sidered a harmless lunatic, a ridicu- larder and wardrobe, he replies, — lous " old fool," but when his power 'Cheer up, little mother, there are began to be understood or misunder- more Americas yet to be discovered stood, for the former word does their and more inventions to be made. In donkeyships too much credit, he was fact,' he adds, with that deep, far- prohibited by royal edit from carry- seeing look of his, ' something else
 * )atent for the support of his family, make everything perfect, and cariied

��ino; out this scheme for a thorough education, and all his schools were stopped. This was his death blow. He could not survive the mortification

��has just occurred to me, which, when I have brouglit it to perfection, will throw all the discoveries of this and everv other age into the shade."

��and defeat. His life will well repay And the mother goes to patch some

a readinof. little garment once more, and to try

The men I have spoken of, though to make one day's dinner expand into

martyrs, have attained their ambition ; enough for two. It is said that

they are beacon lights along a dreary there are always a certain number of

path. Think of the hosts who have people insane on such apparent im-

utterly failed though struggling just possibilities as flying machines and

as intensely as did the few who won perpetual motion and the ])hiloso-

the heigiits. To most of these unfor- pher's stone. Mathematicians have

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