272 MEMOIR OF DR. DALTON, AND 



great nation to be governed in rewarding or encouraging 

 genius by the narrow principle of a strict barter of advantages. 

 With respect to great poets and great historians, no such par- 

 simony has ever been exercised. They have been rewarded, 

 and justly, for the contributions they have cast into the trea- 

 sury of our purely intellectual wealth. And do not justice 

 and policy equally demand that a philosopher of the very 

 highest rank, one who has limited his worldly views to little 

 more than the supply of his natural wants, and has devoted 

 for more than forty years the energies of his powerful mind to 

 enlarging the dominions of science, should be cherished and 

 honoured by that country which receives by reflection the 

 lustre of his well-earned fame ? The most rigid advocate of 

 retrenchment and economy cannot surely object to the moderate 

 provision, which shall exempt such a man in his old age 

 from the irksome drudgery of elementary teaching, and shall 

 give him leisure to devote his yet vigorous faculties to review- 

 ing, correcting, applying, and extending what he has already 

 in great part accomplished. In one instance of recent date, a 

 philosopher who has eminently distinguished himself in purely 

 abstract science, has received the merited reward of a pension 

 for life. It is most desirable then that the British govern- 

 ment, by extending its justice to another not less illustrious, 

 should be spared the deep reproach which otherwise assuredly 

 awaits it, of having treated with coldness and neglect one 

 who has contributed so much to raise his country high among 

 intellectual nations, and to exalt the philosophical glory of 

 the age." 



The application met with success, and at the meeting of 

 the British Association in Cambridge, it was announced by 

 Professor Sedgwick, that the king had granted a pension of 

 £150 to Dalton. This announcement, in the beautiful lan- 

 guage of that eloquent man of science, has been frequently 

 quoted, and is well known. 



