SCIENCE IN ITS USEFUL APPLICATIONS. 391 



of om* daily bread ; but the discipline of having to earn our daily 

 bread is, in more ways than one, a very wholesome discipline for the 

 mass of us, and even for the best of us. It may here and there press 

 hardly on particular natures, but it is rarely an impediment to the 

 achievement of the highest things by those having the moral qualities, 

 the judgment, the determination, and the self-denial necessary above 

 everything else for their achievement. Not a few of us may consider 

 ourselves fitted for higher work than the gods provide for us, and 

 fondly imagine what great things we should effect if we could only 

 have our daily bread supplied to us by the exertions and endowments 

 of other less gifted mortals. But experience is not on the whole fa- 

 vorable to the view that, the conditions being provided, the expecta- 

 tion would be realized. Experience, indeed, rather favors the notion 

 that it is primarily the necessity for work, and association with those 

 under a necessity to work — those in whom a professional spirit has 

 been aroused, and by whom work is held in honor — that creates and 

 keeps up the taste and the habit of work, whereby the vague ambition 

 to achieve is turned to some productive account. Take, say, a thou- 

 sand of the most eminent men the world has produced, and, making no 

 allowance for the large influence of descent or training, or of associa- 

 tion with those to whom work is a necessity, or, having been a necessi- 

 ty, has become a habit, consider what proportion of these men have, by 

 their means and position in early life, been free from any stimulus or 

 obligation to exert and cultivate their powers ; and consider, on the 

 other hand, what proportion of them have been stimulated to exertion 

 and success by the stern necessity of having either to achieve their 

 own careers, or to drop into insignificance, if not indeed into actual 

 -or comparative degradation and poverty. We ought, indeed, all of us 

 to be students, and to be above all things students ; but the most of 

 us can not be, nor is it desirable, save in the case of a special few, that 

 we should be only students. We have all our duties to fulfill in this 

 world, and it is not the least of these duties to render ourselves inde- 

 pendent of support from others, and able ourselves to afford support 

 to those depending upon us. Fortunate are we in being able to find 

 our means of support in the demand that exists for the applications of 

 a science which has for its cultivators so great a charm. To judge, 

 however, not indeed by their coyness when exposed to the occasional 

 temptation of professional work, but rather by their observations on 

 the career of others, the most sought after and highest in professional 

 repute, the pursuit of professional chemistry is, in the opinion of some 

 among us, a vocation open to the gravest of censure. It is praise- 

 worthy, indeed, for the man of science to contribute to his means of 

 livelihood by the dreary Avork of conducting examinations in element- 

 ary science for all sorts of exaniining-boards, and by teaching ele- 

 mentary science at schools and colleges, and by giving popular ex- 

 positions of science at public institutions, and by exchanging a minor 



