"But these are things you must work up for yourselves. You are on a good track now, and have learned some of the principles of such study.
"Go to the originals whenever you can. Read what you understand, and fall back on what you did not understand at first, so as to try it again."
"Do you not think that all the great things have been invented, Uncle Fritz?"
This was John Angier's rather melancholy question.
"Not a bit of it, my boy. Certainly not for as keen eyes as yours and as handy hands. Let me tell you what I heard President Dawson say. He is President of McGill University, and is counted one of the first physical philosophers in America.
"He said this in substance: 'What will future times say of us, the men of the end of the nineteenth century? They will say, "What was the ban on those men, what numbed them or held them still, as if in fear? Why did they not apply in daily life their own great discoveries of the central laws of Nature? They were able to work out principles. Why could they not embody them in useful inventions? They discovered the Ocean of Truth, but they stood frightened on its shore. They found the great principles of science, and for their application they seem to have been satisfied when they had built the steam-engine, had devised the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, and when they had set the electric light a blazing."'
"You see, John, that he thinks there is enough more for you and the rest to invent and to discover."
Then Uncle Fritz took from his ulster pocket Mr. Parton's volume of biographical sketches.
"It is all very fine for you, Miss Alice," he said, "to lie there on your waterproof, and to be sure that even mamma will not scold when you go home. But take the book, and read, and see who has wept and who has starved that you might lie there."
And Alice read the passages he had marked for her.