Stevenson, who invented the steam-engine, was not a college man. He
was the son of a fireman in one of the English collieries. As a boy,
he was himself a laborer in the mines. Undoubtedly the greatest
engineer America has yet produced was Captain Eades, whose fame was
world wide; yet this Indiana boy, who constructed the jetties of the
Mississippi, built the ship railroad across the Isthmus of Panama and
other like wonders, never had a day's instruction in any higher
institution of learning than the common schools of Dearborn County.
Ericsson, who invented the _Monitor_, and whose creative genius
revolutionized naval warfare, was a Swedish immigrant. Robert Fulton,
who invented the steamboat, never went to college.
And take literature: John Bunyan was not only uneducated, but actually
ignorant. If Milton went to college, I repeat that Shakespeare had no
other alma mater than the university of human nature, and that Robert
Burns was not a college man. Our own Washington Irving never saw the
inside of any higher institution of learning. I have already noted
that the author of "Thanatopsis" went to college for only a single
year.
Among the writers, Lew Wallace, soldier, diplomat, and author, was
self-educated.
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