LITTLE THINGS THAT COUNT.

Northland Age, Volume IV, Issue 49, 27 July 1908, Page 8

LITTLE THINGS THAT COUNT.

f GREAT DISCOVERIES RESULTANT FROM TRIFLES. Most of the great discoveries and achievements of the world have resulted from the observation of little things. THE SEAWEED THAT TOLD, A piece of seaweed seen floating past his ship by Columbus was an infinitely small thing in the illimitable ocean expanse, but its observation by the quick eye of the circumnavigator enabled him to quell the mutiny which had arisen among his sailors, and to bring them to the belief that the long-sought for New World wafi near. The art of printing, which has changed the entire course of the world, owes its origin to rude impressions, taken for the edification of children, from letters crudely carved bn the bark of a beech tree. HOW GALILEO WAS INSPIRED. A verger in the cathedral at Pisa, after filling with oil a lamp which hung from the roof, left it swinging tq and fro. Galileo, then eighteen, noting it attentively, conceived the idea of applying it to the measurement of time. After fifty years of hard study and labour, he completed the invention of the pendulum. In like manner, having heard that the children of a Dutch spectaclemaker, by placing several pairs of spectacles before one another, looked through them at a distant object, the glimpse thus afforded Galileo led to the invention of the telescope.

THE NAIL THAT COST A KINGDOM. .

Benjamin Franklin it was who enforced the value of small things by his familiar illustration of the horseshoe nail—for want of a nail the shoe was lost ; for want of a horse the rider was lost, being overtaken and slain by the enemy. That lost nail cost a kingdqm. Then the battle of Dunbar was decided against the Scotch simply because their matches had become exhausted.

It is the little things that cqunt. Attention to seeming trifles in the great American Civil War put the army of the Potomac, which had been broken up and disorganized, into the condition which enabled Grant to hurl it with crashing force against the Confederates. Grant said, “I’ll fight it out on this line if it takes all summer ;’’ but the lines on which Grant fought it out and won were laid by the tireless attention to the little things of detail shown by M'Clellan, who had compacted and solidified the separate units of each regiment. He personally arranged the details of camp life and super intended every department of the unwieldy body of raw recruits. His scientific skill in looking after details and genius for -small things built the bridge over which Grant marched to victory. MOMENTS MAKE MOCH.

Baccyi's fame is mainly duo to books written in his spare hours while he was England’s Chancellor. Humboldt’s days were so occupied with his business that he had to pursue his scientific labours in the night or early morning. Burns wrote his most beautiful poems in his spare moments while working on a farm. Grote wrote his “History of Greece" during the odds and ends of time snatched from his duty as a banker. “Moments are the golden sands of time," if rightly used.— “Scraps.”