Our Circumstances

I have a favorite story that I have told on a number of circumstances that I would like to share with you. I heard it from Jeffrey R. Holland nearly forty years ago during my first summer session at Brigham Young University.

Louis Agassiz, a famous scientist of the 19th Century, gave a lecture in London.
After the lecture a little old lady came up to him in the receiving line and said to him, rather resentfully and spitefully, that he spoke well because he had all the advantages in life but that the poor or average person had few of the opportunities he had to learn what he knew and that he better appreciate it.

After taking this dressing down he asked her, “And what do you do in life?”

She said she and her sister ran a boarding house and that she was the cook. He then said, “And where do you do your work?” She thought that was a stupid question and said, “In the kitchen, of course, while standing on the floor.”

“And what is the material of your floor, Ma’am?”

“Glazed brick.”

“Have you ever wondered what is a glazed brick?”

“No.”

“Hmmm. Well, here’s my card. Write me a note when you have time and tell me what is a glazed brick.”

Well, that made her mad enough to go home and do it. She consulted a dictionary and found that a glazed brick was a piece of baked clay. Realizing that wasn’t enough to send to a renowned Harvard-trained naturalist she consulted an encyclopedia and got more information. Her curiosity piqued, she next went to a brick factory and a tile maker. Then she went deeper into the library and consulted the history and geology sections to find out more about clay and clay beds. She finally decided there were over 120 different kinds of bricks and glazed tiles. She could tell Professor Agassiz that, so she wrote him a note of over thirty 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 made the changes, thought no more of it, and was surprised when a check for $250 came for her in the mail. His attached note said, “I’ve published your piece. What was under the brick?”

She wrote back and said, “Ants.”

He wrote back: “What’s an ant?”

“She went to work and this time she was excited. She found 1825 different kinds of ants. She found that there were ants so small that you could put three to the head of a pin and still have plenty of 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 milked cows and shared it with other ants. She found more ants than anybody had ever found so she wrote Dr. Agassiz something of a treatise, numbering 360 pages. He published it and sent her the money and royalties, which continued to come in.”

The moral? A previously poorly educated and previously short-visioned and unchallenged boarding house keeper had discovered a new life. [With this new source of income and expertise], says Dr. Holland, “she saw the lands and places of her dreams on a little carpet of vitrified kaolin [which is what a brick is] and on the wings of flying ants that may lose their wings on the afternoon they die.” (Jeffrey R. Holland, ten-stake fireside address at Brigham Young University, June 2, 1974)

How many people who are unemployed or underemployed in today’s difficult times might be challenged to do something similar? Probably thousands.