“It is time now,” said he, “that I made my contracts with these builders. I’ll offer—let me see—ten thousand loads, at ten per cent. below the market price; that will bring in the funds, and send out the Excavator. They’ll snap at that, in no time. Then twenty thousand, at fifteen per cent. discount—and I’ll contract to supply the market for three years, at twenty-five per cent. off—and do it, too! Talk about your Liverpool Steamers, and your Girards improving the river fronts, will you? when you can scoup a fortune out of the dock, while these merchant princes are asleep.”
Tom made his terms for the ten thousand loads, “to be delivered as wanted.” He commenced, too, to fulfill his contracts, but the builders “did not want the article at all.” They had contracted for sand—not mud and sand together—and sand they insisted on having.
Alas! for the patent Excavator, neither it nor Tom’s genius could separate the particles. An action was brought against him for obstructing the river front, as soon as it was found he was not backed by government, and was backing himself, out of his contracts.
Tom coolly replied, “that he was devilish sorry, the Patent Steam Sand Excavator and Elevator had not been originally designed to run on land, as it might be used, now, to shovel it back again; but as for himself, he had been thrown so high by the Elevator, that it was doubtful if he would ever come down, in time to attend to it.”
I know another gentleman of the quill—who perpetrated errors of the press of this sort—who, in addition to instructing mankind, took it into his head to teach the hens something that nature never knew. An invention of some gigantic Yankee genius, styled “The Patent Chicken Hatcher, and Grand Cluck to the whole Commonwealth” was irresistible, and he bought it. It was demonstrated upon paper, that a certain number of chickens, ate but a given quantity of corn-meal. That any number of hens laid any number of eggs. That these produced any number of chickens, which, in a very short period of time, sold for any amount of money, or produced other eggs, after eating the aforesaid corn-meal. Now the “Chicken Hatcher,” proposed to improve upon nature by a sort of double rule of three proposition, and to show the result by logarithms as a sort of short-hand process, in the arithmetical progression of profits. “Nature abhors a vacuum,” and she had therefore given up half the argument to the Hatcher—for the proposition was, to keep the hens continually at work, producing eggs for the Hatcher; while the Hatcher was continually working for them, in a sort of compound ratio producing chickens which should go on laying eggs to produce other chickens, ad infinitum. The thing was as plain as the nose on your face. To reason about it was to be absurd. To doubt, was to be scorned. Barbecues looked cheap and plentiful in perspective—roasts abundant, but rather more of a delicacy, as interfering somewhat more with progressive profits.
The eggs of a whole county were first to be submitted to experiment, previous to taking the entire Commonwealth under the capacious wing of the Hatcher. The first process of cubation completed, it was only necessary to heat the Patent, and the business was done, and so were the chickens; but instead of producing hens or roosters, it only roasted the eggs—and very nicely it did it, too, it is said. Nature defied the power of figures, and gave facts as arguments. The hens of the neighborhood survived the innovation, and went on in the old way. Our friend had burned his fingers as well as his eggs, and was sore when the subject was touched. It was his bull, and he didn’t wish him horned. A dilemma, neither horn of which he wished to take. He had hatched himself a life-time remembrancer whenever he heard a cock crow—and he wanted no crowing. He was no eg-otist on this subject; on the whole, he would rather cry peccavi—and shell out—he would stand treats, but no jokes.
But, my dear Jeremy, do not consider me as sneering at the ambition of man to outdo his fellows, to surpass all previous knowledge, to wrest nature from herself to fulfill his purposes—it is of the eternal law of progress. Man can no more stop, and be contented, than the worlds which are revolving in space, can rest and shine on. Each age makes a giant’s stride onward. The past is strewn with theories toppled down, and with systems exploded. The monuments of philosophy, the labor of ages, are the marks now for the child’s finger of scorn. The voyage of Columbus is now the work of a week. Work, did I say?—his toilsome and desolate path over the waters, is now the holyday ramble of all nations. Thought itself leaps a continent in a second, and by means of cipher, is communicated to minds thousands of miles distant, putting the speed of steam, the glory of an age just gone, to shame; accomplishing its purpose, even while the sonorous steam-whistle is but giving its note of departure. The press, in a night, performs the labor of a year, in multiplying printed thought, and a Commonwealth, a Nation is shaken in the time requisite, formerly, to ink the rollers for Franklin’s heavy edition. Who will say that man himself shall not yet be shot into the air like a rocket, and diverge at pleasure to any point of the compass, in defiance of the caprice of air-currents? That if he can now snatch from the sun a likeness of himself in an instant of time, he shall not, one day, look the sun itself in the face with unblinking eyes, take his observations from the horn of some remote planet, and return to earth to record his discoveries. “Philosophy,” you will say. But how much is philosophy herself learning daily? How much of her previous knowledge is shown daily to have been worthless? The chemist, the geologist, the astronomer, torture nature continually for her secrets, but the provident Mother is chary. It is but by a step at a time that her children are allowed to enter into her mysteries, lest the full blaze of her awful truths should suddenly strike them blind.
Shall we be contented, then, and pin our faith to the sleeve of that philosophy, which sees happiness in the indolence and ignorance of the savage, who
“Basks in the glare, and stems the tepid wave,
And thanks his gods for all the good they gave.”