Dr Whewell's Inaugural Lecture. 7 



over the valley of the Mississippi. And when he had done 

 all this, and how^ever carefully he had done it, yet how defec- 

 tive must it be at least in one point ! How far must it be from 

 a simultaneous view of the condition of the whole globe as to 

 material arts. During the time that he has been moving 

 from place to place, the face of the world has been rapidly 

 changing. When he saw Tunis it was a barbarous state ; now 

 that he has to make up his account, it is the first which asks 

 for a leading place among the civilized communities of the 

 industrial world. When he visited the plains of Iowa and 

 Wisconsin, they were wild prairie ; they are now the fields 

 from which the cereal harvest is swept by the latest improved 

 reaping machine. When he was at the antipodes, the naked 

 savage offered the only specimen of art in his rude club and 

 frail canoe ; now there is there a port whose lofty ships carry 

 regularly to European markets multiplied forms of native 

 produce and manufactures. Even if his picture be complete 

 as to surface, what anachronisms must there be in it ! How 

 much that expresses not the general view of the earth, but 

 the accidental peculiarities of the traveller's personal narra- 

 tive ! And then, how dim must be the images of the thing 

 seen many years ago compared with that which is present 

 to the eye ! How impossible to compare the one with the 

 other — the object now seen in age with a similar object re- 

 membered in youth ! And after all, when we have assumed 

 such a traveller — such a one as never has been — the Ulysses 

 of modern times — seeing the cities of many men, and know- 

 ing their minds — seeing the workshops of all nations, and 

 knowing their arts — we have but one such. His knowledge 

 is only his. He cannot, in any clear or effective manner, 

 communicate any large portion of it to others. It exists only 

 for him — it perishes with him. And now let us, in the license 

 of epical imagination, suppose such an Ulysses — much-seeing, 

 much-wandering, much-enduring — to come to some island of 

 Calypso, some well-inhabited city, under the rule of power- 

 ful and benignant, but plainly, he must believe, superhuman 

 influences, and there to find that image of the world and its 

 arts, which he had vainly tried to build up in his mind, exhi- 

 bited before his bodily eye in a vast crystal frame ; — true in 

 every minutest thread and hue, from the sparkle of the dia- 



