36 Selections from Huxley 



that improved knowledge has been incorporated with the 

 household words of men, and has supplied the springs of 

 their daily actions. 



Granting for a moment, then, the truth of that which 

 5 the depredators of natural knowledge are so fond of 

 urging, that its improvement can only add to the resources 

 of our material civilization ; admitting it to be possible that 

 the founders of the Royal Society themselves looked for 

 no other reward than this, I cannot confess that I was 



10 guilty of exaggeration when I hinted, that to him who 

 had the gift of distinguishing between prominent events 

 and important events, the origin of a combined effort 

 on the part of mankind to improve natural knowledge 

 might have loomed larger than the Plague and have out- 



15 shone the glare of the Fire; as a something fraught with 

 a wealth of beneficence to mankind, in comparison with 

 which the damage done by those ghastly evils would 

 shrink into insignificance. 



It is very certain that for every victim slain by the 



20 plague, hundreds of mankind exist and find a fair share 

 of happiness in the world, by the aid of the spinning 

 jenny. And the great fire, at its worst, could not have 

 burned the supply of coal, the daily working of which, in 

 the bowels of the earth, made possible by the steam pump, 



25 gives rise to an amount of wealth to which the millions 

 lost in old London are but as an old song. 



But spinning jenny and steam pump are, after all, but 

 toys, possessing an accidental value; and natural knowl- 

 edge creates multitudes of more subtle contrivances, the 

 30 praises of which do not happen to be sung because they 

 are not directly convertible into instruments for creating 

 wealth. When I contemplate natural knowledge squan- 

 dering such gifts among men, the only appropriate com- 



