tion. Others, again, fritter away all their time and strength in political agitations, or in controversies and gossip; others in idling with music or some other one of the fine arts; others in feasting or fasting, as their dispositions and feelings incline. But the man of concentration of purpose is never a dissipated man in any sense, good or bad. He has no time to devote to useless trifling of any kind, but puts in as many strokes of faithful work as possible toward the attainment of some definite good.

ONE CAUSE of FAILURE.

Thousands of men have failed in life by dabbling in too many things. In ancient times, great men and scholars aspired to know everything, but the day of universal knowledge and scholarship is past. The range of human inquiry has now extended to a degree when the true measure of a man's learning will be the amount of his voluntary ignorance, or the number of studies which he chooses to let alone. And as with

knowledge, so with work. Every man who means to be successful, must single out, from a vast number of possible employments, some specialty, and to that devote himself thoroughly. It will, in fact, puzzle the wisest

and

strongest of men now to keep fairly abreast of any single branch of knowledge, or of industrial enterprise."It is said that a Yankee can splice a rope in many different ways; an English sailor knows but one mode, but that mode is the best. The one thing which an Englishman detests with his whole soul is a Jack-of-all-trades, the miscellaneous man, who knows a little of everything. England is not a country for

average men; every profession is overstocked, and the only chance of success is for the man of signal ability and address to climb to a lofty position over the heads of a hundred others. America, on the other hand, is full of persons who can do many things, but who do no one thing well. The secret of their failure is mental dissipation-the squandering of their energies upon a distracting variety of objects, instead of condensing them upon one." And what is true of England in respect to numbers, is true of all European countries; hence, the best workmen in almost every department of industry in this country are largely foreigners, who, in the Old World, devoted the early part of their lives to the learning of some one trade or profession, and then emigrated to this country, bringing their superior attainment in workmanship with them.

There are very few universal geniuses in the world. Said a learned American chemist, "My friend laughs at me because I have but one idea, but I have learned that if I wish ever to make a breach in a wall, I must play my guns continually upon one point." And such gunnery is usually successful. Said Charles Dickens, "Whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well. What I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to, completely." This he found to be a golden rule. Says Dr. Mathews: "Many a person misses of being a great man by splitting into two middling ones. The highest ability will accomplish but little, if scattered on a multiplicity of objects; while, on the other hand, if one has but a thimbleful of brains, and concentrates them all upon the thing he has in hand, he may achieve

miracles.

Momentum in physics, properly directed, will drive a tallow candle through an inch board." Once in a great while a man appears in history like Cicero, or Bacon, or Dante, or Leonardo da Vinci, who is a real prodigy of genius, and who, like these, acquires an immense amount of learning, and does a great many different kinds of work, and does them all well; but the very rareness of such men proves the contrary condition to be the rule. Da Vinci, the last-named of the above four, was a Florentine painter and sculptor, living from 1452 to 1519. Besides his devotion to painting and sculpture, he excelled in architecture (as did Michael Angelo, his cotemporary), engineering and mechanics generally, botany, anatomy, mathematics and astronomy. He was also a poet and an admirable performer on the lyre. His greatest work in painting, by which he became most. famous, was "The Last Supper," originally executed in oil on the wall of a Dominican convent, and considered at the time to be the best work of art ever produced. Gladstone, when Prime Minister of England, not only attended to the multiplied affairs of State, but at the same time made experiments with Sykes' hydrometer (an instrument for determining the specific gravity of liquids), answered letters innumerable, conducted a correspondence with half a dozen Greek scholars concerning controverted points in Homer, translated scores of English hymns into Latin verse, and wrote occasional pamphlets of forty pages or so, on some legal point. But this very distraction of thought, this want of concentration in effort, was the precise cause of his failure as a party leader, and gave occasion for Disraeli, his rival and