'They are newts, little lizards,' answers a learned
pandit. 'They are spirits of the bog, myths, that hold their carnival
in the early grass of the marshy pools,' says the theorist and poet,
who _believes_ in the idealities of a poetic fancy. 'They are frogs,'
says a third, who is ready to chop any amount of logic in favor of his
system of frogology, and hereupon columns of argument, and pages of
learned discussion, have been held over the identity of the jolly
peepers of the spring-time.
"But you discarded logic, threw away argument, and came down to the
sure demonstrations of sober fact. You watched by the marshy pool, and
caught the 'peeper' in the act, took him '_in flagrante, delicto_,' as
the lawyers say, and thus ended the theoretical discussion about the
'peepers.' You placed another fixed fact upon the page of
natural history.
"And how often has the wisdom of the schools, the philosophy of the
profoundest theorists, been overthrown by the simple demonstrations of
practical facts? For a thousand years the world was in pursuit of the
giant power that lay hidden in heated vapor, the steam that came
floating up from boiling water. That power eluded the grasp and
baffled the research of human genius, which was looking so earnestly
after it, until ingenuity gave it up, and philosophy pronounced it a
delusion.
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