Scientijic Societies. 19 



soared, and bow deep into that lower one she had waved her 

 guiding torch, and victoriously sent her ])iercing gaze ; knowing 

 this, I say, he would liave been too much staggered, and auiazed, 

 and daunted — too painfully and powerfully impressed with the 

 meagre knowledge of his own epoch and the mighty advance of 

 ours — to have any soul left for further inquiry. 



And then, recovering from this tumult of astonishment, our 

 Greek poet may have been reminded that after his time the wisest 

 of his own jjhilosophers had argued contemptuously against phy- 

 siological research, and that before his time the most splendid of 

 his own bards had openly declared that such inquiries " plucked a 

 fruit of useless knowledge." 



Tovs (f>vcri6\oyo\jVTas e(j)r] dreX^ (ro(pias bpintaOai. Kapnov. 



And we should have told him, in explanation, that what among 

 his own countrymen had taken centuries to emerge from a con- 

 dition of vague conjectures, erroneous generalisations, and the 

 wildest guesses, had now been reduced to a series of mighty and 

 fruitful principles, bearing on every action and on every hour of 

 life, ilis countrymen, Socrates and Pindar, would have been the 

 first in these days to retract their censure and sing their paliuodia. 

 They would have found that, so far from being useless, every step 

 of science had been a step of glorious utility, every discovery a 

 discovery of divinely philanthropic force. They would have seen 

 how with an iron rod we rendered the lightning innocuous to the 

 tallest towers ; how with the vapour of boiling water we made our 

 vessels victorious over the waves and independent of the winds, 

 and rushed in a single day, in ease and safety, along our iron roads 

 over distances such as they had never traversed in the circuit of a 

 life. Walking at night through streets as bright as day, they 

 would have learnt that in a space of less than sixty years we had 

 illuminated every city in the civilized world with a soft, bright, and 

 subtle medium, so admirably managed as to be amenable to our 

 wishes at a touch. They would have heard with silent amazement 

 of an invention whereby a mother might hold in a few moments 

 affectionate intercourse with her daughter 10,000 miles away. 

 They would have seen how, with endless contrivances of mechanism 

 we economized the toil, and therefore directed into other channels 

 the energies of millions of mankind. They would have seen 

 our ladies shining in exquisite fabrics woven by machinery from 

 the thin threads spun out of the entrails of a worm. They would 

 have seen us enlist the sunbeams as our pencil, to preserve for us 

 with indelible fidelity the faces of those we loved. They would 

 have been told that with the scratch of a scalpel we rendered 

 innocuous the virulence of the most pestilent disease that ever 



