water, yet I managed to capture and take him home alive.  He was a little animal, certainly, not larger than a half-dollar piece, and it was marvellous how a thing so small could make such a loud and piercing noise.  I took him to my room, and placed him in a water-tight box, in which I fashioned an artificial bog, in the hope that he would confirm my testimony by his piping.  The second evening, as I sat in my room, poring over the recitations of the morrow, he lifted up his voice, loud, shrill, and clear, as when singing in his native marsh.  I hurried, in triumph, to the learned disputants about his identity, and in their presence, he furnished unanswerable evidence that the peeper was a frog, and not a newt.  I was complimented by both the learned pundits, as though I had added a great item to the aggregate of human knowledge.”

“You did do a great thing, my friend,” said Spalding, “you solved a mystery about which men, wise in the learning of the books, had perhaps been disputing for centuries.  What are the peepers? asked the naturalist, who listened to their piping notes from the marshy places in the spring time.  It was a matter of small practical importance, what they were.  Still it was a question which MIND wanted to have solved.  Its solution would do no great amount of good to the world.  But then it was a mystery which it was the business of mind to lay bare; and what more has science done in tracing the history and progress of this earth of ours, as written upon the rocks, among which geology has been so long delving?  ‘What are the peepers?’ asked the naturalist.  ‘They are newts, little lizards,’ answers a learned pandit.  ’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 philosophy of the profoundest theorists, been overthrown by the simple demonstrations of practical facts?  For a thousand years the world was in pursuit of the giant power that lay hidden 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 pronounced it a delusion.  Not far from the beginning of