Thus meditation draws out of the most simple truths the strictness of philosophical demonstration, converting even the amusements of school-boys, or the most ordinary domestic occurrences, into the principle of a new science.  The phenomenon of galvanism was familiar to students; yet was there but one man of genius who could take advantage of an accident, give it his name, and fix it as a science.  It was while lying in his bath, but still meditating on the means to detect the fraud of the goldsmith who had made Hiero’s crown, that the most extraordinary philosopher of antiquity was led to the investigation of a series of propositions demonstrated in the two books of ARCHIMEDES, De insidentibus in fluido, still extant; and which a great mathematician admires both for the strictness and elegance of the demonstrations.  To as minute a domestic occurrence as GALVANI’S we owe the steam-engine.  When the Marquis of WORCESTER was a State prisoner in the Tower, he one day observed, while his meal was preparing in his apartment, that the cover of the vessel being tight, was, by the expansion of the steam, suddenly forced off, and driven up the chimney.  His inventive mind was led on in a train of thought with reference to the practical application of steam as a first mover.  His observations, obscurely exhibited in his “Century of Inventions,” were successively wrought out by the meditations of others, and an incident, to which one can hardly make a formal reference without a risible emotion, terminated in the noblest instance of mechanical power.

Into the stillness of meditation the mind of genius must be frequently thrown; it is a kind of darkness which hides from us all surrounding objects, even in the light of day.  This is the first state of existence in genius.  In Cicero’s “Treatise on Old Age,” we find Cato admiring Caius Sulpitius Gallus, who, when he sat down to write in the morning, was surprised by the evening; and when he took up his pen in the evening, was surprised by the appearance of the morning.  SOCRATES sometimes remained a whole day in immovable meditation, his eyes and countenance directed to one spot, as if in the stillness of death.  LA FONTAINE, when writing his comic tales, has been observed early in the morning and late in the evening in the same recumbent posture under the same tree.  This quiescent state is a sort of enthusiasm, and renders everything that surrounds us as distant as if an immense interval separated us from the scene.  Poggius has told us of DANTE, that he indulged his meditations more strongly than any man he knew; for when deeply busied in reading, he seemed to live only in his ideas.  Once the poet went to view a public procession; having entered a bookseller’s shop, and taken up a book, he sunk into a reverie; on his return he declared that he had neither seen nor heard a single occurrence in the public exhibition, which had passed unobserved before him.  It has been told of a modern astronomer, that one summer night,