i8 SELECTIONS FROM HUXLEY 



graphs, these factories, these printing presses, without which 

 the whole fabric of modern English society would collapse into 

 a mass of stagnant and starving pauperism, that all these 

 pillars of our State are but the ripples and the bubbles upon 

 5 the surface of that great spiritual stream, the springs of which, 

 only he and his fellows were privileged to see ; and seeing, 

 to recognize as that which it behooved them above all things 

 to keep pure and undented. 



It may not be too great a flight of imagination to conceive 



10 our noble revenant not forgetful of the great troubles of his 

 own day, and anxious to know how often London had been 

 burned down since his time, and how often the plague had 

 carried off its thousands. He would have to learn that, 

 although London contains tenfold the inflammable matter 



15 that it did in 1666 ; though, not content with filling our rooms 

 with woodwork and light draperies, we must needs lead in- 

 flammable and explosive gases into every corner of our streets 

 and houses, we never allow even a street to burn down. And 

 if he asked how this had come about, we should have to ex- 



20 plain that the improvement of natural knowledge has fur- 

 nished us with dozens of machines for throwing water upon 

 fires, any one of which would have furnished the ingenious 

 Mr. Hooke, the first "curator and experimenter" of the 

 Royal Society, with ample materials for discourse before half 



25 a dozen meetings of that body ; and that, to say the truth, 

 except for the progress of natural knowledge, we should not 

 have been able to make even the tools by which these ma- 

 chines are constructed. And, further, it would be necessary to 

 add, that although severe fires sometimes occur and inflict 



30 great damage, the loss is very generally compensated by so- 

 cieties, the operations of which have been rendered possible 

 only by the progress of natural knowledge in the direction of 

 mathematics, and the accumulation of wealth in virtue of 

 other natural knowledge. 



