He would say to all visiting inventors seeking advice and encouragement: "I will listen to you, but one thing is no perpetual motion schemes will ever be con

barred sidered."

Edison has probably been more fortunate in combining his versatile inventive ability with commercial success than any other inventor living or dead. Not content with one achievement and its riches, vast sums received from success in one line are expended in research and experiment in other lines. His private laboratory at Orange, N. J., is lavishly planned and stocked with every known tool, with chemical, mineral, metallic, and organic substances, and the pay-roll of the past ten years would amount to a king's ransom. With natural bent, genius, unflagging industry, wonderful discernment and deliberate selection of subject, Edison may truly be said to be the greatest exponent of invention, as an art, the world has yet known.

To-day the world is waiting for the practical introduction of what may prove to be Edison's greatest commercial success the storage battery.

Edison was recently asked to name his principal inventions. He replied characteristically:

"The first and foremost was the idea of the electric lighting station; then let me see, what have I invented? well, there was the mimeograph, and the electric pen, and the carbon telephone, and the incandescent lamp and its accessories, and the quadruplex telegraph, and the automatic telegraph, and the phonograph, and the kinetoscope, and - F don't know, a whole lot of other things."

When asked if he thought the achievements of the twentieth century would surpass those of the one just closed, he said with much enthusiasm :

The

"They certainly will. In the first place, there are more of us to work, and, in the second place, we know more. achievement of the past is merely a point of departure, and you know that, in our art, impossible' is an impossible word."

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Edison is a true captain of industry. Work, constant, enthusiastic work, has ever been his motto. Idleness has no charms for him, and scarcely has recreation or things that please the palate. His analytical, questioning, and sanguine mind is ever reaching for new fields of endeavor.

His con

ception is keen and searching, and he puts the impress of progress on whatever he touches. May he be with us many years! His achievements, it is safe to say, will endure to the end.

THE VALUE OF AN IDEA.

IDEAS, not gold, govern the world. Machines do much of

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the world's work, but machines are born of ideas. human worker without ideas is only a machine. He is content to serve all his life, doing the same work over and over again, making the same thing year after year, without progress, ambition, or purpose. It is the thinking man who becomes master workman, perhaps proprietor. Ideas become to him an inspiration and force. They rally his intellectual powers; and these control and develop his physical ability. Stupidity becomes a machine in the workshop of life, but ideas only can make a man.

It is no chance system that returns to the Hindu citizen a penny, and to the American laborer a dollar for his daily toil; that makes Mexico, with its mineral wealth, poor, and New England, with its granite and ice, rich; that bids the elements in one country become subservient to the wants of man, and in another to sport idly and run to waste; it is thought that makes the difference. Ideas do not stir the Hindu and Mexicans as they do the American. Here they beget enterprise and invincible courage that defy difficulties and surmount obstacles. They assure victory.

Young people should take in the worth of an idea, for this will exert great influence upon the occupation they choose, the methods they adopt, and the books they read. Idealess occupations, associates, and books should be avoided, since they are not friendly to intelligent manhood and womanhood. Ideas make the wise man; the want of them makes the fool.

Roger Sherman, a poor boy in Newton, Massachusetts, was apprenticed to a shoemaker for his board and clothes. There was every prospect that the poverty of his father would be that of the son, and that he would never rise higher than the last on which he worked and the pegs he drove. But early in life the idea took possession of his soul, "I can become a lawyer." How it could be done was not quite plain to him; but from the time the idea possessed him, he said that it must be done.

That idea was the making of him. It rallied his latent faculties, and bent them to one end. To become a lawyer was the dream of his youth. Obstacles dwindled away before the indomitable spirit which that one idea nursed into stalwart life. Every leisure moment became a self-improving moment. A book was his constant companion. Spare time was the most valuable time of all, for it was used to improve his intellect, and fit him for the duties of a noble manhood. His occupation became a teacher to him, and the world a school. He learned from everything around him; and, at thirty-three years of age, he was admitted to the bar. The dream of his boyhood was realized. The idea that possessed him at twelve years of age lifted him out of the dull routine to which he seemed to be doomed for life, and placed him at once higher up in the scale of being.

Roger Sherman grew greater and greater as long as he lived. He became one of the founders of our republic. He was second to no public man as a statesman and wise counselor, and was one of the committee appointed to draft the Declaration of Independence. His wisdom and ability were leading factors in the direction and outcome of the Revolution. Jefferson wrote of him, "He never said a foolish thing in his life." It might have been said of him, in his age, as it was of another, "He was so loaded with laurels that he could scarcely stand erect." The idea of his boyhood, of which we have spoken, was worth to him all that he became worth.

Gutenberg was a thoughtful young man, familiar with manuscript volumes, of which the age in which he lived could furnish but few. One day, when he was in a meditative mood, a new idea flashed upon his mind, namely, that letters might be invented with which to print books, instead of writing and copying them. He unfolded his idea to his wife, and she indorsed the suggestion heartily, whereupon the inventor proceeded at once to reduce his idea to practice. His decided inventive genius soon triumphed, and the art of printing became reality.

Gutenberg, who had been a skilled lapidary, now turned his attention to bookmaking, since which time the value of his new idea to the world has been illustrated by wonderful progress in the art. In contrast with the slow, difficult, and