ADDRESS. xhi 
worthy of any honorary distinction by their government. As it relates to 
themselves, this is of no importance ; but it is of deep concern to the honour 
of this country. The true votary of science loves it for itself: in its posses- 
sion he has a higher honour, a nobler decoration than man can give. He 
does not require to be bribed to follow it by titles or ribbons,—the baits for 
meaner spirits, the lure to lower achievements. But he knows that though 
he despises such gauds, those who bestow them hold them precious; and 
they serve him as a scale, by which he finds that great men once placed a 
Herschel or a Brewster nearly on a level with a third-rate soldier, or the an- 
nual magistrate of some town that might be honoured with a royal visit. 
Nor do [ refer to the miserable ceconomy which permitted such men as Ivory 
and Dalton (to speak only of the dead) to waste, in the drudgery of earning 
‘a precarious subsistence, the years, the powers, the hopes which could have 
borne light into the remotest and darkest recesses of the realms of inquiry ; 
though it does contrast painfully with the munificent provision which repub- 
lican France, and despotic Russia, heap on such men when they can find them. 
Both these spring from the same root,—the gross ignorance in this depart- 
ment of intellect, which up to the beginning of this Association, and long after- 
wards, prevailed in the land. The industrial classes of our countrymen were 
wont to rely in their pursuits on the unenlightened dexterity and empirical 
success which resulted from experience, and to scoff at the idea of learning 
anything useful from a mere theorist ; those, whom wealth and independence 
permitted to choose, seldom sought employment or pleasure in this unfashion- 
able region, their education, though the best then current, having given them 
very little cognizance of what it might contain. And to ascend still higher, 
even to the executive and legislative bodies, they ‘‘cared still less for science ;” 
the tension of political life engrossed all their faculties: they disliked philo- 
sophers as meddlers, or despised them as dreamers. The head of a great 
military department once said that he hated scientific officers! Any one of 
his engineers might have told him that more money had been wasted, and 
lives lost in that department, from sheer ignorance of science, than any one 
could think of without shame and sorrow. The question which I know to 
have been asked by another in “ high places,” though milder in expression, 
was not less scornful— Of what use is science?” He who asked it ought 
to have known better. Whatever tends to raise man above low and sensual 
pursuits—whatever to lead him from the partial and present to the general 
and the future—whatever to exalt in his mind the dominion of order and the 
supremacy of truth,—that must be useful to the individual, useful to the na- 
tion. Even had he been incapable of rising above the gross measure of pe- 
cuniary value, he ought to have been able to give a mighty answer to his own 
