28 OX IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE i 



more complete and our obedience the expression 

 of our knowledge, London will count her centuries 

 of freedom from typhoid and cholera, as she 

 now gratefully reckons her two hundred years 

 of ignorance of that plague which swooped upon 

 her thrice in the first half of the seventeenth 

 century. 



Surely, there is nothing in these explanations 

 which is not fully borne out by the facts ? Surely, 

 ill.- principles involved in 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 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 improvement of our knowledge of 

 Nature, and the extent to which that improved 

 knowledge has been incorporated with the house- 

 hold 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 

 s<> 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 

 tli- I loyal Society themselves looked for no other 

 1 than this, I cannot confess that I was 



