A hermit is a mad man. Without friends and wife and child, there is nothing left worth living for. The unsocial are the enemies of joy. They are filled with egotism and envy, with vanity and hatred. People who live much alone become narrow and suspicious. They are apt to be the property of one idea. They begin to think there is no use in anything. They look upon the happiness of others as a kind of folly. They hate joyous folks, because, way down in their hearts, they envy them.
I think we came from the lower animals. I am not dead sure of it, but think so. When I first read about it I didn't like it. My heart was filled with sympathy for those people who leave nothing to be proud of except ancestors. I thought how terrible this will be upon the nobility of the old world. Think of their being forced to trace their ancestry back to the Duke Orang-Outang or to the Princess Chimpanzee. After thinking it all over I came to the conclusion that I liked that doctrine. I became convinced in spite of myself. I read about rudimentary bones and muscles. I was told that everybody had rudimentary muscles extending from the ear into the cheek. I asked: "What are they?" I was told: "They are the remains of muscles; they became rudimentary from the lack of use." They went into bankruptcy. They are the muscles with which your ancestors used to flap their ears. Well, at first I was greatly astonished, and afterward I was more astonished to find they had become rudimentary.
It is often said of this or that man that he is a self-made man--that he was born of the poorest and humblest parents, and that with every obstacle to overcome he became great. This is a mistake. Poverty is generally an advantage. Most of the intellectual giants of the world have been nursed at the sad but loving breast of poverty. Most of those who have climbed highest on the shining ladder of fame commenced at the lowest round. They were reared in the straw thatched cottages of Europe; in the log houses of America; in the factories of the great cities; in the midst of toil; in the smoke and din of labor.
A cubit is twenty-two inches; so that the ark was five hundred and fifty feet long, ninety-one feet and eight inches wide, and fifty-five feet high. The ark was divided into three stories, and had on top, one window twenty-two inches square. Ventillation must have been one of Jehovah's hobbies. Think of a ship larger than the Great Eastern with only one window, and that but twenty-two inches square!