THE PRIDE OF IGNORANCE. 255 



asks the farmer wlio has to take a h)iij]r cross- 

 countrv drive hy lonely lanes on a dark eveniiiix. 

 *^0h, look in the almanac, and you'll lind it in a 

 minute 1 " " When will the tide be high enougii 

 to cross the bar? " asks tlie sailor off tiie mouth of 

 a dilHcult harbor. '' Oh, look into the sailing- 

 directions, and you'll see it put down plain and 

 simple in black and white for you ! " They forget 

 that the calculations tlie result of which they can 

 thus so easily secure were made for their use 

 beforehand by long hours of patient work on the 

 part of trained and educated assistants at Trinity 

 House or Washington Observatory. Thus igno- 

 rance continues to despise knowledge through 

 mere oblivion of its own indebtedness. 



The fact is, every action and every movement 

 of our own lives, in the midst of our high existing 

 civilizations, are dependent in a thousand ways 

 upon remote and difficult scientific calculations, 

 the very nature and special usefulness of which 

 most of us are absolutely incapable of compre- 

 hending. No ship, for example, could sail tlie 

 sea to bring us the tea of China or the wool of 

 Australia, English hardware, or West Indian 

 sugar, were it not for abstruse and coinplieated 

 mathematical calculations, reckonings of latitude 

 and longitude, of sunrise and sunset, of transits 

 of Venus and lunar eclipses, of right ascension 

 and declination and horizontal parallax and semi- 



