herited weakness may account for these peculiarities. Little snapping-turtles snap—so the great naturalist tells us—before they are out of the egg-shell. I am satisfied, that, much higher up in the scale of life, character is distinctly shown at the age of —2 or —3 months.
———My friend, the Professor, has been full of eggs lately. [This remark excited a burst of hilarity, which I did not allow to interrupt the course of my observations.] He has been reading the great book where he found the fact about the little snappingturtles mentioned above. Some of the things he has told me have suggested several odd analogies enough.
There are half a dozen men, or so, who carry in their brains the ovarian eggs of the next generation's or century's civilization. These eggs are not ready to be laid in the form of books as yet; some of them are hardly ready to be put into the form of talk. But as rudimentary ideas or inchoate tendencies, there they are; and these are what must form the future. A man's general notions are not good for much, unless he has a crop of these intellectual ovarian eggs in his own brain, or knows them as they exist in the minds of others. One must be in the habit of talking with such persons to get at these rudimentary germs of thought; for their development is necessarily imperfect, and they are moulded on new patterns, which must be long and closely
