20 SELECTIONS FROM HUXLEY 



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 

 5 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 difference due to the im- 

 provement of our knowledge of Nature, and the extent to 

 which that improved knowledge has been incorporated with 



10 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 

 depreciators of natural knowledge are so fond of urging, that 

 its improvement can only add to the resources of our material 



15 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 guilty of exaggeration 

 when I hinted, that to him who had the gift of distinguishing 

 between prominent events and important events, the origin 



20 of a combined effort on the part of mankind to improve natu- 

 ral 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 



25 into insignificance. 



It is very certain that for every victim slain by the 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 



30 daily working of which, in the bowels of the earth, made 

 possible by the steam pump, gives rise to an amount of 

 wealth to which the millions lost in old London are but as 

 an old song. 



