Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 2

[318] the first rude arrow made by a Greek or Egyptian hand, down through the Middle Ages, to the last revolver that Yankee skill has lent to war; every form of furniture, if he chooses to turn there; every plan of a city, ancient or modern; every bone, every fact of anatomy illustrated for him. The very share our institutions give to each man in the government, the responsibility we lay on him will call out, more than anywhere else has been manifested, an eager love for these things.

It is but just to say, that our community has made most readily the amplest use of all means provided by government or individuals. In our libraries, books wear out in using; and no complaint is made anywhere of want of popular interest in any scientific collection. You know not how the taste grows by the feeding. We sometimes forget how the sight of these stores unfolds a taste which the man himself never dreamed he possessed. He gazes, and, lo! he too is a thinker and a student, instead of a half-wakened brute, born only, as the Roman says, “to consume the fruits of the earth.” He no longer merely digs or cumbers the ground, or hangs a dead weight on some braver soul. He thinks--and his spreading pinion lifts his fellows. Mr. Waterston taught this in the anecdote he mentioned, of a glance at Franklin's urn first revealing to Greenough that he was a sculptor. You know the great John Hunter, the head of English surgery, constructed with his own hands a museum of comparative anatomy a hundred feet long, and every spot filled with some specimen which his own hands had preserved in the leisure of a large city practice. A lady once asked him, “Mr. Hunter, what do you think is to be our occupation in heaven?” “I do not know,” replied the old mall; “I cannot tell what we shall do there; but if the Almighty God would grant me the liberty to sit and think, for eternity, of his wonderful ”