I ON IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 29 



guilty of exaggeration when I hinted, that to him 

 who had the gift of distinguishing between 

 prominent events and important events, the 

 origin of a combined effort on the part of man- 

 kind 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 com- 

 parison 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 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 squander- 

 ing such gifts among men, the only appropriate 

 comparison I can find for her is, to liken her to such 



