8 



summer and winter, of seed time and harvest, and is to the 

 world the inexhaustible source of those subtle energies which 

 play so essential a part in all the vital and physical phenom- 

 ena of the globe, and without which the globe itself were but a 

 realm of perpetual silence, darkness and death. 



And the same harmony that thus holds between the useful 

 and the attractive in nature, holds also between their correlates, 

 the practical and the speculative, in science ; for science is 

 but the revelation of nature the formal expression and embodi 

 ment of her facts and laws. Science has, therefore, like nature, 

 both a practical and a speculative side an aspect of utility, 

 as well as of attractiveness and beauty ; and, hence, that 

 training in science must be essentially defective which does 

 not recognize this fact, and impress the corresponding qualities 

 upon the character of the student. The student of science, 

 rightly trained, will be, in fact, both a theorist and a practical 

 man in the proper sense of that term ; a cultivator of science 

 for its own sake, and also for its uses, in its abstract and spec- 

 ulative forms, and in its applications to the arts of liie. The 

 two correlated qualities fitly supplement each other in his 

 education, and conspire to prepare him for more certain success 

 in his career. 



Not that he must preserve, necessarily, an exact balance 

 between the two, and never become, distinctively, either the 

 one thing or the other, either a devotee of abstract science, or 

 a thorough man of business, if his tastes, his talents or his 

 circumstances so incline him. He will, if wise, follow his bent, 

 atid allow either the one element or the other to preponderate 

 in his professional life, as he shall see fit. Possibly, he will 

 specially devote himself to pure science, pursuing it for the 

 mere love of it, and bringing himself, with all the zeal and 

 enthusiasm of Newton over his soap-bubbles, or La Grange 



