EDUCATION IN AGRICULTURE. 27 



example of great technological uses coming out of purely scien- 

 tific researches. The school of Plato, long before the Cliristian 

 era, investigated with great diligence these geometric curves 

 as a pure matter of scientific curiosity, and were reproved by 

 Socrates for wasting their time and their powers on such en- 

 tirely useless subtilties. Nearly eighteen centuries passed away, 

 and these curves were still of use only as an intellectual gym- 

 nastic for students curious in such matters. But when modern 

 science and modern art began to make their rapid advances 

 these conic sections became the foundation of navigation and 

 surveying, and architecture and engineering ; so that the purely 

 speculative theorems of the leaders of science in Athens, having 

 for almost two thousand years after their promulgation no 

 practical utility whatever, have now become the most intensely 

 practical and useful truths for all the civilized world. Many 

 hundreds of instances, not of course so striking as this, but as 

 exactly in point, might be brought forward to show that even 

 when the discoveries of science do not immediately seem of 

 practical utility, their utility may afterward be revealed by 

 practical men ; and that while science is, first of all and 

 above all, to be sought for truth's own sake, it is secondarily 

 also to be sought for the utilities which may be developed out 

 of it. No man can calculate the pecuniary value, the commer- 

 cial and business benefit to the world, of that geometrical fancy 

 of Plato, the section of a cone by a plane, out of which so large 

 a proportion of modern practical, applied mathematics has grown 

 up. 



In order that practical men may more rapidly avail them- 

 selves of the labors of scientific men, schools of applied science, 

 that is of the more recondite arts, ought always to be placed in 

 the close neighborhood of schools of pure science. Both the 

 students and the teachers in these two departments of intel- 

 lectual labor find a mutual benefit in a free interchange of 

 thought. Neither understands what the other wants, and each 

 will give the other aid only by accident ; but it is by accidents 

 that will continually happen, if the two sets of men are brought 

 into continual intercourse. The technological student will sug- 

 gest, most frequently without knowing it, valuable problems to 

 the scientific inquirer, and the scientific inquirer will make, 

 without knowing it, communications to the inventive spirit of 



