One of the commonest excuses which we are all apt to make when we do not know anything, says the " Practical Engineer," is the plea that we have not had the time to look it up because our other duties have engrossed our time. Hundreds of men, young and old, have thus cheated themselves with the notion that they would do some desirable thing if they only had the time.

The truth is, however, that the busiest of us could find leisure for doing the extra things by utilizing the odd chinks and crevices of time and turning them from idle moments into drops of useful knowledge and self-improvement. It is not the man who is surrounded by a luxurious library with whole days of leisure on his hands who makes the most of his opportunities. It is rather the man who, whenever he gets the chance to get hold of a book, will, for the five or ten minutes' leisure that he may have, bathe in its intellectual riches and bring up facts that can never be loosened from his grasp.

In estimating the time which a man can give to self-improvement, it has been figured out that if the average man lives to be 70 years old, or for 25,500 days, he will have only about 4000 days left at his disposal for direct intellectual development. Surely, then, in looking over the field of successful men it can truly be said that it has been the little drops of knowledge with the added grains of sense that have made this country mighty and its engineering achievements so immense.