A few years later the Naval Academy was founded at Annapolis, and a similar course was pursued to provide it with a corps of instructors.

If my impressions are correct, our educational planing mill cuts down all the knots of genius, and reduces the best of the men who go through it to much the same standard.

So far as the economic condition of society and the general mode of living and thinking were concerned, I might claim to have lived in the time of the American Revolution.

I finally reached the conclusion that mathematics was the study I was best fitted to follow, though I did not clearly see in what way I should turn the subject to account.

I had not yet gotten into the world of light. But I felt as one who, standing outside, could knock against the wall and hear an answering knock from within.

The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery and known forms of force, can be united in a practical machine by which men shall fly along distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration to be.

In 1860 a total eclipse of the sun was visible in British America.