RELATION OF SCIENCE TO HUMAN LIFE—SEDGWICK. 675 
Faraday, Dalton, Arago, Richard Owen, Darwin, Lyell, Joh. Miiller, 
Agassiz, Helmholtz, Stokes, Kelvin, and Pasteur. 
The advance of knowledge is yearly becoming more rapid; if its 
steps were slow and hesitating in the seventeenth and eighteenth 
centuries, and if it quickened to a rapid walk in the nineteenth, we 
now hear the sound of a trot, which at the end of the century will be 
a gallop, and as the centuries succeed one another its pace will become 
ever faster. Where will it lead us and what will be the upshot for 
man ? 
But it is no part of my purpose to-day to give you an historical 
summary of scientific progress. The point I wish to illustrate is the 
vast increase in the scientific army and in the results achieved by them. 
My thesis is that pure research into the sequence of natural phe- 
nomena is in itself of the greatest importance to the progress and 
welfare of humanity, and that a great statesman can have no higher 
aim than to solve the problem of how it may best be fostered. To 
what extent can such a thesis be justified by experience? | 
I might begin by examining the origin and progress of our knowl- 
edge of what is called current electricity, to which modern life, from 
a material point of view, owes so much. In illustration of what we 
owe to workers in electrical science I need only mention land telegra- 
phy, ocean telegraphy, wireless telegraphy, telephones, electric light, 
electric traction, and our knowledge of radio-activity. The history of 
this science forms perhaps the best example of the importance to man 
of pure, apparently useless, scientific research, for at every stage of it, 
from Galvani’s original observation through the discoveries of the 
Swede Oersted and of the Frenchman Ampére to those of our own 
Faraday and to the theoretical adumbrations of Clerk Maxwell and 
to the researches of Crookes on the passage of electricity through 
vacuum tubes, we meet with the investigation of phenomena which 
were apparently perfectly useless, and which to most practical men 
must at the time they were made have appeared as little more than 
scientific toys provided by nature for the harmless amusement of the 
queer people who meet in the rooms of the Royal Society and such-like 
places where unpractical oddities resort. And yet I ask you to reflect 
upon the astounding results which have arisen from Galvani’s ob- 
servations made to discover the cause of the twitching of the frog’s 
legs, and of Faraday’s discovery of induction, and to indulge your 
imaginations in an endeavor to predict what may issue for man from 
Crookes’s investigations of the glow without heat of the vacuum tubes. 
But I have neither the knowledge nor the time to dwell upon the 
physical side of science. As in private duty bound, I must devote 
the short time at my disposal to examples culled from the biological 
sciences, 
