The famed naturalist of the last century, Louis Agassiz, was lecturing in London and had done a marvelous job. An obviously bright little old lady, but one who did not seem to have all the advantages in life, came up and was spiteful. She was resentful and said that she had never had the chances that he had had and she hoped he appreciated it. He took that bit of a lacing very pleasantly and turned to the lady and, when she was through, said,
"What do you do?"
She said, "I run a boarding house with my sister. I'm unmarried."
"What do you do at the boarding house?"
"Well, I skin potatoes and chop onions for the stew. We have stew every day."
"Where do you sit when you do that interesting but homely task?"
"I sit on the bottom step of the kitchen stairs."
"Where do your feet rest when you sit there on the bottom step?"
"On a glazed brick."
"What's a glazed brick?"
"I don't know."
"How long have you been sitting there?"
"Fifteen years."
Agassiz concluded, "Here's my card. Would you write me a note when you get a moment about what a glazed brick is?"
Well, that made her mad enough to go home and do it. She went home and got the dictionary out and found out that a brick was a piece of baked clay. That didn't seem enough to send to a Harvard professor, so she went to the encyclopedia and found out that a brick was made of vitrified kaolin and hydrous aluminum silicate, which didn't mean a thing to her. She went to work and visited a brick factory and a tile maker. Then she went back in history and studied a little bit about geology and learned something about clay and clay beds and what hydrous meant and what vitrified meant. She began to soar out of the basement of a boarding house on the wings of words like vitrified kaoline and hydrous aluminum silicate. She finally decided that there were about 120 different kinds of glazed bricks and tiles. She could tell Agassiz that, so she wrote him a little note of thirty-six pages and said, "Here's your glazed brick."
He wrote back, "This is a fine piece of work. If you change this and that and the other, I'll prepare it for publication and send you that which is due you from the publication." She thought no more of it, made the changes, sent it back, and almost by return mail came a check for 250 dollars. His letter said, "I've published your piece. What was under the brick?"
And she said, "Ants."
He replied (all of this by mail), "What's an ant?"
She went to work and this time she was excited. She found 1,825 different kinds of ants. She found that there were ants that you could put three to the head of a pin and still have standing room left over. She found that there were ants an inch long that moved in armies half a mile wide and destroyed everything in their path. She found that some ants were blind; some ants lost their wings on the afternoon they died; some milked cows and took the milk to the aristocrats up the street. She found more ants than anybody had ever found, so she wrote Mr. Agassiz something of a treatise, numbering 360 pages. He published it and sent her the money and royalties, which continued to come in. She saw the lands and places of her dreams on a little carpet of vitrified kaolin and on the wings of flying ants that may lose their wings on the afternoon they die.
[Jeffrey R. Holland, "Borne upon Eagles' Wings," in Speeches of the Year, 1974 (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1975), pp. 402–3; see also Marion D. Hanks, The Gift of Self (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1974), pp. 151–53]
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