390 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



seem to be very much wanted. While the investigation of nature and 

 the interpretation of natural law are admittedly among the highest, as 

 they are among the most delightful of human occupations, the right 

 application of natural law to effect desirable objects is in itself a 

 scarcely less worthy occupation ; many of these objects being of para- 

 mount importance, and attainable only by the exercise of high scien- 

 tific sagacity and skill, aided by a fertility of resource and a persistent 

 elasticity of spirit, ready ever to cope with the successive novel diffi- 

 culties found to be continually opposing themselves. 



In this matter, as in so many others, the sense of proportion is but 

 too often lost sight of. Because the investigations of a Newton, a 

 Darwin, a Dalton, a Joule, and a Faraday have an importance of 

 which few among us can adequately conceive even the measurement ; 

 because among the scientific men now or but lately living in our midst 

 are to be found those whose investigations in pure science have not 

 only won for them a high renown, but have earned for them the grati- 

 tude, and should have obtained for them the substantial acknowledg- 

 ments of their country and the world ; and because even the minor 

 investigations and discoveries that are ever being made in pure sci- 

 ence have all of them their merit and their value, it does not follow 

 that the mere accomplishment, it may be in an abundant leisure, of 

 two or three minor investigations, however creditably conducted, are 

 to lift their authors into a scientific position, altogether above that of 

 men whose laborious lives have been spent in rendering their great 

 scientific attainments directly serviceable to the needs of the state and 

 of the community. The accomplishment of such like investigations 

 does not entitle their authors to claim exemption from the duty of 

 earning their own livelihoods, or give them a claim to be endowed by 

 the contributions of others with the means to jog leisurely along, 

 w^ithout responsibilities and without anxieties, the far from thorny 

 paths of their own predilection. However heterodox it may be thought 

 by some, the best of all endowments for research is unquestionably 

 that with which the searcher, relying on his own energies, succeeds in 

 endowing himself. The work to which our natures are repugnant, 

 not less than the work which entrances us and hardly makes itself felt 

 as a work at all, has to be done. In some degree or other, we have 

 most of us to obtain our own livelihood ; and harsh as may seem the 

 requirement, it will, I suppose, be conceded that the necessity put upon 

 the mass of mankind, of having to earn their daily bread, is an ar- 

 rangement of Providence which has, on the whole, worked fairly well ; 

 and further, that the various arrangements hitherto tried for exempt- 

 ing certain classes of men from the necessity of having to earn their 

 daily bread, in order that they might give themselves up to the higher 

 spiritual or intellectual life, have scarcely, to say the least of them, 

 worked quite so satisfactorily as they were intended to. All of us 

 are, without doubt, qualified for higher things than the mere earning 



