Be not immoderate in urging your friend to discover a secret.

Speak not in an unknown tongue in company, but in your own language,
and as those of quality do, and not as the vulgar.




LESSON XLVII

USING THE EYES

The difference between men consists, in great measure, in the
intelligence of their observation. The Russian proverb says of the
non-observant man, "He goes through the forest and sees no firewood."

"Sir," said Johnson, on one occasion, to a fine gentleman, just
returned from Italy, "some men will learn more in the Hampstead stage
than others in the tour of Europe." It is the mind that sees as well
as the eye.

Many, before Galileo, had seen a suspended weight swing before their
eyes with a measured beat; but he was the first to detect the value of
the fact. One of the vergers in the cathedral at Pisa, after filling
with oil a lamp which swung from the roof, left it swinging to and fro.
Galileo, then a youth of only eighteen, noting it attentively,
conceived the idea of applying it to the measurement of time.

Fifty years of study and labor, however, elapsed before he completed