ON IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 23 



years of ignorance of that plague which swooped upon 

 her thrice in the first half of the seventeenth century. 



Surely, there is nothing in these explanations which 

 is not fully borne out by the facts ? Surely, the prin- 

 ciples involved in them are now admitted among the 

 fixed beliefs of all thinking men ? Surely, it is true 

 that our countrymen are less subject to fire, famine, 

 pestilence, and all the evils which result from a want 

 of command over and due anticipation of the course 

 of Nature, than were the countrymen of Milton; and 

 health, wealth, and well-being are more abundant with 

 us than with them ? But no less certainly is the differ- 

 ence due to the improvement of our knowledge of Nature, 

 and the extent to which 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 the depredators of natural knowledge are so 

 fond of urging, that its improvement can only add to 

 the resources of our material civilisation; admitting 

 it to be possible that the founders of the Royal Society 

 themselves looked for not other reward than this, I 

 cannot confess that I was 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 outshone 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 plague, hundreds of mankind exist and find a 



