PROF. C. U. SHEPHARD'S ADDRESS. 265 



pectful remove possible, from all contact with matter, and the 

 every-day labors of men engaged in the arts. I might perhaps 

 afford you an illustration of the truth of this representation. A 

 president of one of these institutions, on being shown through 

 the physical department of another, the best-endowed in natural 

 sciences of any in the country, on taking leave of the distin- 

 guished professor who had been his conductor, begged to know 

 of what conceivable use to mankind were all such provisions ! 

 Here was a distinguished scholar, at the head of an American 

 college, who had got so completely away from matter, as not to 

 be conscious that a knowledge of its properties was of the least 

 utility to mankind ! 



Take one other exemplification of the difficulty which the 

 mere literary man experiences, in estimating aright the practi- 

 cal business of life. One of the most eminent of American 

 scholars, and at the same time a distinguished statesman, argued 

 a short time ago in Congress against the employment of the 

 Smithsonian fund, for purposes of practical advantage; — using 

 the word "practical" in its common acceptation, and, of 

 course, in opposition to its college and literary use. He enter- 

 tained the House of Representatives with a strain of fine 

 thoughts, expressed in lofty diction, in favor of appropriating 

 the money to the purchase of a library. In the course of his 

 remarks, he insisted, that " a laboratory was a mere charnel- 

 house, and that experiments are but the dry bones of science." 

 He would direct the attention of mankind away from matter, 

 "to thc^e great subjects," as he was pleased to style them, 

 " which are not bounded by the three dimensions, which are not 

 ponderable, not cognizable by any of the senses." In the halls 

 of the American Congress, in the year of our Lord eighteen 

 hundred and forty-six, asked this polished orator, in dead earn- 

 est, " What have our boasted researches taught us to accom- 

 plish, in the industrial arts, that the cunning workmen of Egypt 

 and Tyre and Greece could not do, three thousand years ago ?" 

 And, to crown the climax, he claimed, that our independence 

 was declared and maintained by scholars ! Listen to the decla- 

 ration, ye shades of Washington, the farmer and civil engineer — • 

 of Franklin, the printer and electrician — and of Jefferson, the 

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