There are so many well-known instances of men who have been able to continue their intellectual labors under the most unfavorable conditions, that your argument might be powerfully supported by an appeal to actual experience. There is Archimedes, of course, to begin with, who certainly seems to have abstracted himself sufficiently from the tumult of a great siege to forget it altogether when occupied with his mathematical problems. The prevalent stories of his death, though not identical, point evidently to a habit of abstraction which had been remarked as a peculiarity by those about him, and it is probable enough that a great inventor in engineering would follow his usual speculations under circumstances which, though dangerous, had lasted long enough to become habitual. Even modern warfare, which from the use of gunpowder is so much noisier than that which raged at Syracuse, does not hinder men from thinking and writing when they are used to it. Geoffrey St. Hilaire never worked more steadily and regularly in his whole life than he did in the midst of the besieged city of Alexandria. "Knowledge is so sweet," he said long afterwards, in speaking of this experience, "that it never entered my thoughts how a bombshell might in an instant have cast into the abyss both me and my documents." By good luck two electric fish had been caught and given to him just then, so he immediately began to make experiments, as if he had been in his own cabinet in Paris, and for three weeks he thought of nothing else, utterly forgetting the fierce warfare that filled the air with thunder and flame, and the streets with victims. He had sixty-four hypotheses to amuse him, and it was necessary to review his whole scientific acquirement with reference to each of these as he considered them one by one. It may be doubted, however, whether he was more in danger from the bombardment or from the intensity of his own mental concentration. He grew thin and haggard, slept one hour in the twenty-four, and lived in a perilous condition of nervous strain and excitement. Goethe at the bombardment of Verdun, letting his mind take its own course, found that it did not occupy itself with tragedies, or with anything suggested by what was passing in the conflict around him, but by scientific considerations about the phenomena of colors. He noticed, in a passing observation, the bad effect of war upon the mind, how it makes people destructive one day and creative the next, how it accustoms them to phases intended to excite hope in desperate circumstances, thus producing a peculiar sort of hypocrisy different from the priestly and courtly kind. This is the extent of his interest in the war; but when he finds some soldiers fishing he is attracted to the spot and profoundly occupied--not with the soldiers, but with the optical phenomena on the water. He was never very much moved by external events, nor did he take that intense