x.] FEAR OF SCIENCE. 251 



that science and superstition will to the world's end 

 remain irreconcilable and internecine foes. 



Conceive the feelings of an old Lapland witch, who 

 has had for the last fifty years all the winds in a seal- 

 skin bag, and has been selling fair breezes to northern 

 skippers at so much a puff, asserting her powers so 

 often, poor old soul, that she has got to half believe 

 them herself conceive, I say, her feelings at seeing 

 her customers watch the Admiralty storm-signals, and 

 con the weather reports in The Times. Conceive the 

 feelings of Sir Samuel Baker's African friend, Katchiba, 

 the rain-making chief, who possessed a whole houseful 

 of thunder and lightning though he did not, he con- 

 fessed, keep it in a bottle as they do in England if 

 Sir Samuel had had the means, and the will, of giving 

 to Katchiba's Negros a course of lectures on electricity, 

 with appropriate experiments, and a real bottle full of 

 real lightning among the foremost. 



It is clear that only two methods of self-defence 

 would have been open to the rain-maker : namely, either 

 to kill Sir Samuel, or to buy his real secret of bottling 

 the lightning, that he might use it for his own ends. 

 The former method that of killingthe man of science 

 was found more easy in ancient times ; the latter in 

 these modern ones. And there have been always those 

 who, too good-natured to kill the scientific man, have 

 patronised knowledge, not for its own sake, but for the 

 use which may be made of it ; who would like to keep 

 a tame man of science, as they would a tame poet, or a 

 tame parrot ; who say Let us have science by all 

 means, but not too much of it. It is a dangerous 

 thing; to be doled out to the world, like medicine, 

 in small and cautious doses. You, the scientific i 



