VAUGHAN ON VALUE OF SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH TO STATE. 29 



life? It is by arts derived from chemistry and mechanics and founded 

 purely upon experiments. Why is the steam engine now carrying on 

 operations which formerly employed in painful and humiliating labor 

 thousands of our robust peasantry, who are now more nobly or more use- 

 fully serving their country either with the sword or with the plow? It 

 was in consequence of experiments upon the nature of heat, and pure 

 physical investigation. In every part of the world manufactures mnde 

 from the mere clay and pebbles of your soil may be found, and to what is 

 this owing? To chemical arts and experiments. You have excelled all 

 other people in the products of industry.' but why? Because you have 

 nseisted industry by science. Do not regard as indifferent what is your 

 true and greatest glory. Except in thes-e res])ects and in the light of a 

 pure system of faith, in what are you superior to Athens or to Rome? 

 Do you carry away from them the palm in literature and the fine arts? 

 Do you not rather glory, and justly too, in being in these respects their 

 imitators? Is it not demonstrated by the nature of your system of pub- 

 lic education and by your popular amusements? In what then are you 

 their superiors? In everything connected with physical science, with 

 the experimental arts. These are your characteristics. Do not neglect 

 them. You have a Newton who is the glory not only of your own country, 

 but of the human race. You have a Bacon whose precepts may still be 

 attended to with advantage. Shall Englishmen slumber in that path 

 which these great men have opened, and be overtaken by their neighbors? 

 Say rather that all assistance shall be given to their efforts; that they 

 shall be attended to. encouraged and sunported," These words sj)oken 

 by one of the greatest philosophers of England might with scarcely a 

 change in a sentence be addressed to the American people today. If 

 this nation has become a world ])Ower it owes its position to tlie fact 

 that by scientific means it has developed its internal resources, and if the 

 time ever comes when it shall discourage science it will lose the proud 

 position which it now occupies. 



I must be permitted to take the time to bring before you one or two 

 additional examples of the great benefit that the world has derived from 

 scientific discoveries which at the time they were made were regarded as 

 being possessed of but little importance. The question. What is the use 

 of scientific work? is an old one. Benjamin Franklin answered this ques- 

 tion in his characteristic way by asking what is the use of a baby. What 

 can it do? Let it grow into something and then see. It has been fre- 

 quently said that the life of Michael Farady was that of a pure scientist. 

 He loved science for its own sake, and he seemed to care but little about 

 anv practical uses that might be made of his discoveries, yet as Tyndall, 

 Gladstone and others have shown, a great many of Farady's discoveries 

 have been applied to practical uses with great benefit to mankind. He 

 discovered benzene, which L'-^.ter, as we all know, became the kernel of 

 organic chemistry. This was converted, as Gladstone has pointed out, 

 into nitrobenzol. a gift to the confectioner and the perfumer. Through 

 the labors of Hofmann all of the anilin dyes with their brilliant colors 

 on fibres of all kinds have resulted from Farady's discovery of benzene. 

 Sir William Thompson utilized the new property of matter discovered 

 by Farady, and designated by him as "^specific inductive capncity," in 

 determining the dimensions of submarine cables, and it is said that when 

 Cyrus Field was projecting the Atlantic cable he went to Farady, talked 



