Pushing to the Front | Page 6

know what to do until
another boy, Astley Cooper, took his handkerchief and stopped the
bleeding by pressure above the wound. The praise which he received
for thus saving the boy's life encouraging him to become a surgeon, the
foremost of his day.
"The time comes to the young surgeon," says Arnold, "when, after long
waiting, and patient study and experiment, he is suddenly confronted

with his first critical operation. The great surgeon is away. Time is
pressing. Life and death hang in the balance. Is he equal to the
emergency? Can he fill the great surgeon's place, and do his work? If
he can, he is the one of all others who is wanted. His opportunity
confronts him. He and it are face to face. Shall he confess his ignorance
and inability, or step into fame and fortune? It is for him to say."
Are you prepared for a great opportunity?
"Hawthorne dined one day with Longfellow," said James T. Fields,
"and brought a friend, with him from Salem. After dinner the friend
said, 'I have been trying to persuade Hawthorne to write a story based
upon a legend of Acadia, and still current there,--the legend of a girl
who, in the dispersion of the Acadians, was separated from her lover,
and passed her life in waiting and seeking for him, and only found him
dying in a hospital when both were old.' Longfellow wondered that the
legend did not strike the fancy of Hawthorne, and he said to him, 'If
you have really made up your mind not to use it for a story, will you let
me have it for a poem?' To this Hawthorne consented, and promised,
moreover, not to treat the subject in prose till Longfellow had seen
what he could do with it in verse. Longfellow seized his opportunity
and gave to the world 'Evangeline, or the Exile of the Acadians.'"
Open eyes will discover opportunities everywhere; open ears will never
fail to detect the cries of those who are perishing for assistance; open
hearts will never want for worthy objects upon which to bestow their
gifts; open hands will never lack for noble work to do.
Everybody had noticed the overflow when a solid is immersed in a
vessel filled with water, although no one had made use of his
knowledge that the body displaces its exact bulk of liquid; but when
Archimedes observed the fact, he perceived therein an easy method of
finding the cubical contents of objects, however irregular in shape.
Everybody knew how steadily a suspended weight, when moved,
sways back and forth until friction and the resistance of the air bring it
to rest, yet no one considered this information of the slightest practical
importance; but the boy Galileo, as he watched a lamp left swinging by

accident in the cathedral at Pisa, saw in the regularity of those
oscillations the useful principle of the pendulum. Even the iron doors of
a prison were not enough to shut him out from research. He
experimented with the straw of his cell, and learned valuable lessons
about the relative strength of tubes and rods of equal diameters.
For ages astronomers had been familiar with the rings of Saturn, and
regarded them merely as curious exceptions to the supposed law of
planetary formation; but Laplace saw that, instead of being exceptions,
they are the sole remaining visible evidences of certain stages in the
invariable process of star manufacture, and from their mute testimony
he added a valuable chapter to the scientific history of Creation.
There was not a sailor in Europe who had not wondered what might lie
beyond the Western Ocean, but it remained for Columbus to steer
boldly out into an unknown sea and discover a new world.
Innumerable apples had fallen from trees, often hitting heedless men on
the head as if to set them thinking, but Newton was the first to realize
that they fall to the earth by the same law which holds the planets in
their courses and prevents the momentum of all the atoms in the
universe from hurling them wildly back to chaos.
Lightning had dazzled the eyes, and thunder had jarred the ears of men
since the days of Adam, in the vain attempt to call their attention to the
all-pervading and tremendous energy of electricity; but the discharges
of Heaven's artillery were seen and heard only by the eye and ear of
terror until Franklin, by a simple experiment, proved that lightning is
but one manifestation of a resistless yet controllable force, abundant as
air and water.
Like many others, these men are considered great, simply because they
improved opportunities common to the whole human race. Read the
story of any successful man and mark its moral, told thousands of years
ago by Solomon: