i.-\ ADFISAELENESS OF IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE. <J 



of command over and clue anticipation of the course of 

 Nature, than were the countrymen of Milton ; and health, 

 wealth, and well-being are more abundant with us than 

 with them ? But no less certainly is the difference due 

 to the improvement of our knowledge of Nature, and 

 the extent to which that improved knowledge has been 

 incorporated with the household words of men, and has 

 supplied the springs of their daily actions. 



Granting for a moment, then, the truth of that which 

 the depredators of natural knowledge are so fond of 

 urging, that its improvement can only add to the resources 

 of our material civilization ; admitting it to be possible that 

 the founders of the Eoyal Society themselves looked for 

 no other reward than this, I cannot confess that I was 

 guilty of exaggeration when I hinted, that to him who 

 had the gift of distinguishing between prominent events 

 and important events, the origin of a combined effort 

 on the part of mankind to improve natural knowledge 

 might have loomed lamer than the Plague and have out- 

 shone the glare of the Fire ; as a something fraught with 

 a wealth of beneficence to mankind, in comparison with 

 which the damage done by those ghastly evils would 

 shrink into insignificance. 



It is very certain that for every victim slain by 

 the plague, hundreds of mankind exist and find a fair 

 share of happiness in the world, by the aid of the 

 spinning jenny. And the great fire, at its worst, could 

 not have burned the supply of coal, the daily working 

 of which, in the bowels of the earth, made possible by the 

 steam pump, gives rise to an amount of wealth to which 

 the millions lost in old London are but as an old song. 



But spinning jenny and steam pump are, after all, but 

 toys, possessing an accidental value ; and natural know- 

 ledge creates multitudes of more subtle contrivances, the 



