12 TOWN GEOLOGY. 



in increasing the employment for workmen and 

 others." * 



" All this may be very true. But of what practical 

 use will physical science be to me ? " 



Let me ask in return: Are none of you going to 

 emigrate ? If you have courage and wisdom, emigrate 

 you will, some of you, instead of stopping here to 

 scramble over each other's backs for the scraps, like 

 black-beetles in a kitchen. And if you emigrate, you 

 will soon find out, if you have eyes and common sense, 

 that the vegetable wealth of the world is no more ex- 

 hausted than its mineral wealth. Exhausted ? Not 

 half of it I believe not a tenth of it is yet known. 

 Could I show you the wealth which I have seen in a 

 single Tropic island, not sixty miles square precious 

 timbers, gums, fruits, what not, enough to give em- 

 ployment and wealth to thousands and tens of thousands, 

 wasting for want of being known and worked then, 

 you would see what a man who emigrates may do, by 

 a little sound knowledge of botany alone. 



And if not. Suppose that any one of you, learn- 

 ing a little sound Natural History, should abide 

 here in Britain to your life's end, and observe 

 nothing but the hedgerow plants, he would find that 

 there is much more to be seen in those mere hedge- 

 row plants than he fancies now. The microscope 

 will reveal to him in the tissues of any wood, of 

 any seed, wonders which will first amuse him, then 

 puzzle him, and at last (I hope) awe him, as he 

 perceives that smallness of size interferes in no way 

 with perfection of development, and that " Nature/' 

 as has been well said, "is greatest in that which is 

 least." And more. Suppose that he went further 



* See " Nature," No. XXV. (Macmillan & Co.) 



