The pious zeal of
Mr. Winthrop Sargent, who brought a cargo of living turtles more
than a thousand miles to the head-quarters of testudinous learning
at Cambridge, is only paralleled by the memorable act of the Pisans
in transporting ship-loads of holy soil from Palestine to fill their
Campo Santo. Genius is marked by nothing more distinctly than that
it makes the world its tributary. He from whose lips it speaks has
but to look calmly into the eyes of dull routine, of jaded toil, of
fickle childhood, and utter the words, "Follow me." Custom-house
officials close their books, tired fishermen leave their nets,
riotous boys forsake their play, to do the master's bidding. Is he
making collections for some great purpose of study? Piece by piece
the fragmentary spoils flow in upon him, of all sizes, shapes, and
hues; a chaos of confused riches, perhaps only a wealth of rubbish,
as they lie at his feet. One by one they fall into harmonious
relations, until the meaningless heap has become a vast mosaic,
where nothing is too minute to fill some interstice, nothing too
angular to fit some corner, nothing so dull or brilliant of tint
that it will not furnish its fraction of light or shadow. Such has
been the history of those years of labor the results of which these
volumes present to us. Whatever may have been said of the devotion
of our countrymen to material interests, the wise and winning lips
had only to speak, and such a currency of _plastrons_ and _carapaces_
was set in circulation, that the contemplative stranger who saw the
mighty coinage of Chelonia flowing in upon Cambridge might well have
thought that the national idea was not the Almighty Dollar, but the
Almighty Turtle.
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