IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 343 



abundant with us than with them ? But no less certainly 

 is the difference due to the improvement of our knowledge 

 of Nature, and the extent to which that improved know- 

 ledge 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 

 depreciators 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 guilty 

 of exaggeration when I hinted, that to him who had the 

 gift of distinguishing between prominent events and import- 

 ant 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 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, 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 know- 

 ledge creates multitudes of more subtle contrivances, the 

 praises of which do not happen to be sung because they 

 are not directly convertible into instruments of creating 

 wealth. When I contemplate natural knowledge squander- 

 ing such gifts among men, the only appropriate comparison 

 I can find for her is, to liken her to such a peasant woman 

 as one sees in the Alps, striding ever upward, heavily 

 burdened, and with mind bent only on her home ; but 

 yet, without effort and without thought, knitting for her 

 children. Now stockings are good and comfortable things, 

 and the children will undoubtedly be much the better for 

 them ; but surely it would be short-sighted, to say the 

 least of it, to depreciate this toiling mother as a mere 

 stocking-machine a mere provider of physical comforts ? 



