Every strong man stands upon the shoulders of his ancestors. When you start for the top of Pike's Peak you start at Omaha. When you reach Denver you are six thousand feet in the air, and Pike's Peak is shouldered up on the foot-hills. Socrates is a great teacher, but look at Sphroniscus, the sculptor, his father. Paganini is a great musician, but Paganini was born of musicians whose wrists had muscles that stood out like whip-cords. Bach is a great musician, but there were forty people of the name of Bach mentioned in musical dictionaries. Charles Darwin is the great scientist, but there were four generations of scientists who had made ready for Darwin, just as there were seven generations of scholars that culminated in Emerson. And standing in the shadow behind Abraham Lincoln are half a dozen generations of men and women who handed forward to him a perfect logic engine, a sound mind, in a sound body; a mental instrument that worked without fever and without friction and without flaw. At the hands of Stradivarius one piece of apple wood is fashioned into a violin. If Stradivarius passes by the other board because he has not time, let no man say the board that was undeveloped was not full of latent music. The Divine Artist and Architect shaped Abraham Lincoln's nature into a world instrument, but the same quality and the stuff were in his father and mother, who lived and died a bundle of roots that were never planted, a handful of blossoms that never fruited. Lincoln's father and mother were like the crystal caves in their own Kentucky. There the traveller is led through a cave of crystals, newly discovered. One day a farmer ploughing thought the ground sounded hollow under his feet. Going to the barn, he brought a spade and opened up an aperture. Flinging down a rope, his friends let the explorer down, and when the torches were lighted, lo, a cave as of amethysts, sapphires and diamonds! For generations the cave had been undiscovered and the jewels unknown. Wild beasts had wandered above these flashing gems, and still more savage men had lived and fought and died there. And yet just beneath was this cave of splendid beauty. Oh, pathetic illustration of men who are big with talent, of women full of latent gifts, of fathers and mothers like Thomas Lincoln and his young wife, who struggle on without opportunity, who are denied their chance, who are imprisoned by poverty, and fettered by circumstance, who are like birds beating bloody wings against the bars of an iron cage, who die unfulfilled prophecies, and dying, transfer their ambitions to their gifted children, believing that their son shall behold what the father and mother must die without seeing. God worked no miracle in Abraham Lincoln.