instances where the best employees have overlooked important points
which could not have escaped their own observation as a proprietor. No
man has a right to expect to succeed in life unless he understands his
business, and nobody can understand his business thoroughly unless he
learns it by personal application and experience. A man may be a
manufacturer: he has got to learn the many details of his business
personally; he will learn something every day, and he will find he will
make mistakes nearly every day. And these very mistakes are helps to him
in the way of experiences if he but heeds them. He will be like the
Yankee tin-peddler, who, having been cheated as to quality in the
purchase of his merchandise, said: "All right, there's a little
information to be gained every day; I will never be cheated in that way
again." Thus a man buys his experience, and it is the best kind if not
purchased at too dear a rate.

I hold that every man should, like Cuvier, the French naturalist,
thoroughly know his business. So proficient was he in the study of
natural history, that you might bring to him the bone, or even a section
of a bone of an animal which he had never seen described, and, reasoning
from analogy, he would be able to draw a picture of the object from
which the bone had been taken. On one occasion his students attempted to
deceive him. They rolled one of their number in a cow skin and put him
under the professor's table as a new specimen. When the philosopher came
into the room, some of the students asked him what animal it was.
Suddenly the animal said "I am the devil and I am going to eat you." It
was but natural that Cuvier should desire to classify this creature, and
examining it intently, he said:

"Divided hoof; graminivorous! It cannot be done."