A LECTURE BY ABRAHAM LINCOLN DELIVERED IN 1860

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DISCOVERIES
AND
INVENTIONS
A LECTURE BY
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
DELIVERED IN
1860

SAN FRANCISCO
JOHN HOWELL
1915

A PREFATORY NOTE
The Lecture—“Discoveries and Inventions”—by our greatest American, presents a phase of Lincoln’s activity about which little is generally known. It shows as clearly as any of his other writings how great was Lincoln’s knowledge of the progress of mankind, particularly as related in the Bible, and it reveals also his debt to that Book of Books for inspiration and illustration, as well as his masterly use of pure English, largely gained through that study.

In the fateful year of 1860, the year of his election to the presidency, Lincoln took up, in the pause of his affairs after the long debate with Douglas, the custom of lyceum lecturing, then in greatvogue. This lecture on “Discoveries and Inventions” was delivered in towns near his home, Springfield, Illinois, and in Springfield itself on Washington’s birthday. Five days later Lincoln made his great speech at Cooper Union in New York.

The lecture is not included with any collection of Lincoln’s addresses. It appeared in print for the first time in Sunset Magazine in 1909—the centennial of Lincoln’s birth.

The original manuscript, from which this edition, the first in book form, is made, was a cherished possession of the late Dr. Samuel Houston Melvin, of Oakland, California, formerly a resident of Springfield, Illinois, and a friend of Mr. Lincoln.
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All creation is a mine, and every man a miner.

The whole earth, and all within it, upon it, and round about it, including himself, in his physical, moral, and intellectual nature, and his susceptibilities, are the infinitely various “leads” from which, man, from the first, was to dig out his destiny.

In the beginning, the mine was unopened, and the miner stood naked, and knowledgeless, upon it.

Fishes, birds, beasts, and creeping things, are not miners, but feeders and lodgers merely. Beavers build houses; but they build them in nowise differently, or better now, than they did, five thousand years ago. Ants and honey bees provide food for winter; but just in the same way they did, when Solomon referred the sluggard to them as patterns of prudence.

Man is not the only animal who labors; but he is the only one who improves his workmanship. This improvement he effects by Discoveries and Inventions. His first important discovery was the fact that he was naked; and his first invention was the fig-leaf apron. This simple article, the apron, made of leaves, seems to have been the origin of clothing—the one thing for which nearly half of the toil and care of the human race has ever since been expended. The most important improvement ever made in connection with clothing, was the invention of spinning and weaving. The spinning jenny, and power loom, invented in modern times, though great improvements, do not, as inventions, rank with the ancient arts of spinning and weaving. Spinning and weaving brought into the department of clothing such abundance and variety of material. Wool, the hair of several species of animals, hemp, flax, cotton, silk, and perhaps other articles, were all suited to it, affording garments not only adapted to wet and dry, heat and cold, but also susceptible of high degrees of ornamental finish. Exactly when, or where, spinning and weaving originated is not known. At the first interview of the Almighty with Adam and Eve, after the fall, He made “coats of skins, and clothed them” (Genesis iii: 21).

read the rest of the lecture here:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/52007
 
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