286 THE LEAD IN SCIENCE, HOW OBTAINED. 



be brought to bear upon practical agriculture by a man 

 of a practical turn of mind and some familiarity 

 with rural affairs, than Dr Emmons, to whom one 

 branch of the geological and the whole of the agricul 

 tural department of the survey has been entrusted. But 

 the ambition to overtake too many branches, to cover too 

 much ground by his own exertions, and to do too much 

 work in far too little time has led him, I fear, to sacri 

 fice accuracy to extent, and to waste, in re-doing 

 what others had better done before, a precious energy 

 and life which might have dug out much treasure to the 

 permanent enriching of science, and the bestowal of new 

 honour upon himself and his country. 



The eager impatience to play the first role in science, 

 as in politics, is not to be gratified by the execution of a 

 vast amount of work, but by doing what is performed 

 accurately and well. Nor will it be attained by shutting 

 up American science in a series of swaddiings under 

 the name of classifications and nomenclatures merely 

 national. This may retard the progress of general 

 science, but it cannot give America rule in the scientific 

 world. The direction of a given branch of natural 

 science will always remain with those, in whatever coun 

 try they may happen to live, who, at a given time, are 

 generally believed by its living cultivators to have done 

 most to promote its advancement. And whenever our 

 Transatlantic cousins shall have leisure so to devote the 

 energies of any one of their countrymen, as to enable him 

 to take the lead of all others in widening some one 

 branch of natural knowledge or fixing its principles, then 

 all Europe will readily bow to his authority, and most 

 willingly adopt the amendments he may recommend in 

 nomenclature and classification, and even hail them as 

 most efficient helps towards the further progress of pure 

 science. 



The other important labour I have referred to is an 



