his courage and his constancy to the truth; but if he had adopted perpetual motion, instead of the rotundity of the earth, as his dogma, he would have deserved our praises just as much. His sole claim to our admiration is, that in the teeth of all precedent and likelihood, he succeeded by one mistake in making another: because he fancied that by sailing west he could find the Indies, he blundered upon a land whose identity he never discovered. Doubtless his blunder was of unspeakable value; but a blunder not the less it was; while as to his courage and perseverance, as much has been shown by a thousand other scientific and philosophical heretics, whose names have not survived, because the thing they imagined turned out an error. From another point of view, however, Columbus is specially a creature of his age. It was an age which felt, it knew not why, that something new must come to pass. The resources of Europe were exhausted; men had reached the end of their tether, and demanded admittance to some wider pasturage. It was much such a predicament as obtains now, four hundred years later; we feel that changes--enlargements--are due, but know not what or whence. The conception of a voyage across the Atlantic, in that age, seemed as captivating, and almost as fantastic, as a trip to the Moon or Mars would, to an adventurer of our time. Given the vehicle, no doubt many volunteers would offer for the journey; Columbus could get a ship, but the chances of his arriving at his proposed destination must have appeared as problematical to him as the Moon enterprise in a balloon would to a world-weary globe-trotter of to-day. It was not merely that the ship was small and the Atlantic large and stormy; there were legends of vast whirlpools, of abysmal oceanic cataracts, of sea-monsters, malignant genii, and other portents not less terrifying and fatal. Columbus would not have been surprised at falling in with any of these things; but the physical courage which must have been his most prominent trait, added to incorrigible pride of opinion, brought him through. But the significant feature of his achievement is, not that he sailed or that he arrived, but that he was impelled, irresistibly as it were, to make the attempt. He made it, because it was the one thing left in the world that seemed worth doing; it was the only apparent way of escape from the despair of the familiar and habitual; it was an adventure charged with all unknown possibilities; once conceived, it must be executed at whatever cost. Columbus was fascinated; the unknown drew him like a magnet; he was the involuntary deputy of his period to incarnate its yearnings in act. The hour had struck; and with it, as always, appeared the man. So it has ever been in the history of the world; though we, with characteristic vanity, uniformly put the cart before the horse, and declare that it is the man that brings the hour.