"But impulse and activity may move blindly. Another cardinal quality of such a culture, therefore, must be precision--the close, clean working of the faculties. A memory trained to clear recollection, what a saving of reiterated labor and of annoying helplessness. A discrimination sharpened to the nicest discernment of things that differ, though always a shining mark for the arrow of the satirist, will outlive all shots with his gray-goose shaft; for it shines with the gleam of tempered steel. An exactness of knowledge that defines all its landmarks, how is it master of the situation. A precision of speech, born of clear thinking, what controversial battlefields of sulphurous smoke and scattering fire might it prevent. He has been called a public benefactor who makes two blades of grass grow where one grew before. He is as great a benefactor, who in an age of verbiage makes one word perform the function of two. Wonderful is the precision with which this mental mechanism may be made to work. Some men can even think their best on their feet in the presence of a great assembly. There are others whose spontaneous thoughts move by informal syllogisms. Emmons sometimes laid off his common utterances like the heads of a discourse. Johnson's retorts exploded like a musket, and often struck like a musket-ball. John Hunter fairly compared his own mind to a bee-hive, all in a hum, but the hum of industry and order and achievement. It reminds us, by contrast, of other minds formed upon the model of the wasp's nest, with a superabundance of hum and sting without, and no honey within. It was of the voluminous works of a distinguished author that Robert Hall remarked,--'They are a continent of mud, sir.' Nuisances of literature are the men who fill the air with smoke, relieved by no clear blaze of light. There have been schools of thought that were as smoky as Pittsburg. We have had 'seers' who made others see nothing, men of 'insight' with no outlook, scientists who in every critical argument jumped the track of true science, and preachers whose hazy thoughts and utterances flickered between truth and error. Pity there were not some intellectual Sing-Sing for the culprit!