72 MEMOIE OF DR. DALTON, AND 



Although unwilling to offend, he was accustomed sometimes 

 to give severe rebukes to ignorance when it pretended to 

 know, and in this capacity alone do we find him ever creating 

 a feeling of opposition in those who surrounded him, although 

 even this was seldom, and only on great provocations, and 

 chiefly in his character as President of the Philosophical 

 Society, where the exercise of wise authority was expected 

 and desired. Local memory tells us of several severe, but 

 well deserved and not ill-natured rebukes. 



In a life of labor, of experiments with weights and with 

 numbers, it is seldom that the imagination flourishes, and so 

 we find that literature was entirely neglected, and his own 

 discoveries have not been illuminated by the radiance which 

 it is in the power of some men to shed around the creations 

 of their mind, but have been sent out dry and hard into the 

 world to gather as they best might the life which he was 

 certain of obtaining for them. 



In this is the secret of many varying opinions about Dalton ; 

 this is the secret of his want of success in early life, of his 

 remaining so long apart from scientific men, and of the dis- 

 putes as to his originality. The "genial current of the soul" 

 had been constitutionally stopped, and words were wanting to 

 express his feeling, which at last seemed not even to struggle 

 for utterance. He gave us knowledge, mere knowledge does 

 not give life until it is become a familiar inmate of the mind, 

 until we can see it in all or many of its aspects, until it 

 becomes an object on which we delight to gaze, and seeing 

 its beauty begin to surround it with results from the imagina- 

 tion. He that can do this, putting the results of science into 

 a poetic form, and impressing them upon the mind, receives 

 often more admiration than the originator, the exertions of 

 whose whole life may probably be summed up in a sentence, 

 and seen at a glance by the popular eye; but experience 

 proves that the original work requires a persistance of efibrt 

 and a clearness of conception, which are very rarely united. 



