ON IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 25 



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

 edge 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 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 impor- 

 tant 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 happi- 

 ness 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 knowledge 

 creates multitudes of more subtle contrivances, the praises 

 of which do not happen to be sung because they are not 

 directly convertible into instruments for creating wealth. 

 When I contemplate natural knowledge squandering such 

 gifts among men, the only appropriate comparison I can 



-^ 



