27 



whilst the imaginative, enthusiastic, and truth-loving 

 Kepler — the speculative and profound Leibnitz — the 

 systematic Linnaeus — the poetical (Ersted — and the com- 

 prehensive Humboldt, are brilliant illustrations of how 

 largely the aesthetic faculty may dwell in minds which 

 have made incursions the deepest and the widest into 

 the realms of scientific truth. 



Finally, it should not be forgotten, that the practical 

 applicatioyis to which almost every conquest in the physi- 

 cal world leads, are themselves the fruit of that unity 

 and harmony which animate the whole material universe. 

 But I am far from believing that it needs any plea of mere 

 utility — in the too-generally accepted sense of that term^ 

 as synonymous with money vahie^-to gain for physical 

 studies a cordial reception from every lover of truth, 

 and every well-wisher of the intellectual and moral ad- 

 vancement of our race. All honor to those practical sci- 

 ences which the ' stern realities of life have called into 

 existence — but " man does not live by bread alone" — it 

 is not enough to minister to mere physical wants — it is, 

 indeed, necessary that he should be housed, and fed, and 

 clothed, but there are higher elements of his beings 

 the intellectual, the moral, and the religious, which link 

 him with a purer order of existence, which make him 

 the heir of immortality, the aspirant of Heaven. Sci- 

 ence is not to be estimated by coin. Truth must not be 

 despised, if we do not find in it a value which can be 

 weighed in the scales of the money-changer. There is 

 another balance in which the labors of th^honest-hearted 

 student, who loves truth for its own sake, will yet be 

 tried, and in which they shall not be found wanting. 

 He who feels a real delight in the knowledge he gains. 



