NATURE 
AS) 
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 1869. 
THE DULNESS OF SCIENCE 
E have all heard of the fox who, when he had lost 
his own tail, tried to prevail upon his comrades to 
dispense with theirs ; and we think it must surely have been 
in a congress of the blind that the question was first 
started, “Is it dull to use your eyes and look about you ?” 
For, in fact, what is science but this? We come un- 
expectedly into a great mansion, of which we know 
nothing ; and if it be dull to seek out the various inmates 
of the house, and to ascertain its laws and regulations, 
then is science dull; but if this be important and interest- 
ing, then so also is science interesting. 
But, alas! the blind in this sense are numbered by 
myriads ; and as they, for a time, almost threaten to carry 
their point, a few remarks upon the dulness of science, or 
rather, perhaps, the dulness of men, may not be out of place. 
We have in our mind’s eye at the present moment seve- 
ral notable specimens of blind men. One of these lives 
not very far from where we write—a most hopeless indi- 
vidual ; we had better not inquire too narrowly concerning 
his occupation ; he will be found somewhere in the pur- 
lieus of this great city. His one sense is the sense of 
gain. We remember once seeing through a microscope 
the animalcules of a drop of water, and we noticed that 
one of the largest of these had one end fixed to the side of 
the vessel, while its arms and mouth were busy gathering 
up and swallowing its smaller neighbours. Now, the man 
of whom we speak is only this animalcule magnified with- 
out the microscope. Ignorant of all laws, civil, religious, 
physical, moral, social, sanatory, he rots in his place until 
Dame Nature, in one of her clearing-out days, fetches at 
him with her besom the plague ; and he is swept aside and 
seen no more. 
Our country readers are no doubt well acquainted with 
Farmer Hodge. One day he happened to sit next the 
poet Coleridge, listening, with that reverence for his betters 
to which he had been early trained, to the marvellous say- 
ings of the great man, and it was only when the apple 
dumpling made its appearance that he exclaimed, “ Them’s 
the jockeys for me!” Hodge, we fear, maintains no sort 
of relations with the universe around him. He farms in 
the same way in which his grandfather did, and has the 
most profound aversion for the steam plough. 
He told Tennyson— 
“But summun’ ull come ater mea mayhap wi’ ’is kittle o’ steam, 
Huzzin’ an’ maazin the blessed fealds wi’ the Divil’s oan team. 
Gin I mun doy I mun doy, an’ loife they says, is sweet ; 
But gin I mun doy I mun doy, for I couldn abear to see it.” 
Nevertheless, Hodge has some sense of his duty to his 
neighbour. Indeed, we learn from D’Arcy Thompson, 
that being once asked What is thy duty towards thy neigh- 
bour? he wrote as follows upon a slate :— 
“My duty tords my nabers, is to love him as thyself, 
and to do to all men as I wed thou shall do and to me, 
to love, onner and suke my farther and mother, to onner 
and to bay the Queen, and all that are pet in a forty 
under her, to smit myself to all my gooness, teaches, 
sportial pastures and marsters, to oughten myself lordly 
and every to all my betters, to hut nobody by would nor 
deed, to be trew in jest in all my deelins, to beer no malis 
nor ated in yours arts, to kep my hands from pecken and 
steel, my turn from evil speaking, lawing and slanders, 
not to civet nor desar othermans good, but to laber trewly 
to git my own leaving, and to my dooty in that state if 
life, and to each it is please God to call men.” 
Ascending in the scale, we come next to our friend 
“Cui Bono ;” a very good sort of man, very fussy, very 
philanthropic, and very short-sighted,—in fact, he sees 
nothing distinctly that is more than one inch from his face. 
He called upon us the other day to give us a little good 
advice: it was about the time when our astronomers 
were investigating the chromosphere of the sun. “ What,” 
he asked, “is the use of all this? will it put one penny in 
your pocket or mine? will it help to feed, or clothe, or 
educate your family or mine? Take my advice, sir, and 
have nothing to do with it.” We did not reply to him; 
indeed we learned afterwards that he had just written an 
article on the subject in one of the journals. Next day 
he called upon us in a state of high jubilation; he had 
just seen a friend of his who had succeeded in making 
a useful application of some great discovery, which, being 
within the requisite zch, was clearly perceived by “ Cui 
Bono”—“ A very useful and practical discovery, sir, which 
will greatly alleviate human suffering; none of your 
hydrogen-in-the-sun business.” And so the successful 
adapter got all the praise, while the wretched man of 
science who discovered the principle was left out in 
the cold. 
Still ascending in the scale, we come to a man of strong 
mental eyesight, but without leisure to use it ; one that it 
makes us grieve to see, inasmuch as he is capable of far 
better things. His ears are not altogether stopped to the 
mighty utterance that all nature gives, nor yet is he wholly 
ignorant, when at night he looks upwards, of that which 
the firmament declares; but its utterance is drowned 
in the tumult of a great city, while its starlight is 
quenched in the smoke. Our sentiment for such a man 
is that of pity ; for indeed, what with the cares of this 
world and the deceitfulness of riches, he has a hard 
battle to fight. 
But is it not melancholy to reflect how great a pro- 
portion of the energy of this country is devoted to the 
acquisition of gain, and how small a proportion to the 
acquisition of knowledge ? 
We have now arrived at the ranks of the affluent and 
the nobly-born, where, if anywhere, we might expect 
to find “tastes refined by reading and study, and judg- 
ments matured by observation and experience ;” but how 
seldom is this the case? The mental eyesight is often 
weak to begin with, and often is it rendered still weaker 
by poring over classics without end. The unfortunate 
youth is then sent to make the tour of Europe. He 
is sent to Switzerland and the Alps to see all that is 
grand in nature, and to Rome and Paris to see all that is 
great in art, and he comes home wretched and disgusted, 
and no wonder. He has been made the unfortunate 
-subject of a senseless experiment—an experiment much 
the same as that of turning a man with weak eyes into a 
picture gallery in order to improve them. His friends 
forget that appreciation of the beautiful and the true is 
the product of the coming together of two things—eye- 
sight and nature. In fact, the result is much the same, 
whether a man with no eyes is carried out into a glorious 
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