tauntingly said that the other hemisphere had been discovered not by skill but by chance, and could have been just as easily discovered by anybody else, he proposed an elegant problem. “How,” he asked, “can a hen’s egg, unsupported, be made to stand on its end?” When all had tried in vain to do this, he tapped the shell gentlyupon the table, cracked it, and in this way made it stand. The others laughed, and exclaimed that they could do the same thing. “No doubt you can, now that you have seen how it can be done,” said he, “but how is it that no one could do it before me?”
5. I believe that the same thing would have happened if John Faust, the inventor of printing, had made it known that he possessed a method by which one man, within a week, could copy more books than ten of the fastest copyists could copy in a year in the ordinary way; that the books would be better written; that from beginning to end all the copies would be exactly similar; and that all would be absolutely free from errors provided that one copy had been corrected. Who would have believed him? Who would not have thought it a riddle, or a piece of vain and foolish boasting? And yet every child knows now that this is sober truth.
6. If Berthold Schwartz, the inventor of muskets, had addressed the archers with these words: “Your bows, your catapults, and your slings are of little worth. I will give you a weapon which, without any human force, by the agency of fire alone, will not only hurl forth stones and iron, but will propel them farther and with more certainty, so that they will strike, uproot, or lay low whatever comes in their way.” Which of them would not have received him with laughter? So much is it the custom to consider everything new as marvellous and incredible.
7. Nor could the American Indians comprehend how one man is able to communicate his thoughts to another without the use of speech, without a messenger, but by simply sending a sheet of paper. Yet with us a man of the meanest intelligence can understand this.
