ADDRESS. 25 
more prevalent in our schools and universities. Abstract science depends 
on the support of men of leisure, either themselves possessing or having 
provided for them the means of living without entering into the pursuits 
of active industry. The pursuit of science requires a superfluity of wealth 
in a community beyond the needs of ordinary life. Such superfluity is 
also necessary for art, though a picture ora statue is a saleable commodity, 
while an abstract discovery in science has no immediate or, as regards 
the discoverer, proximate commercial value. In Greece, when philo- 
sophical and scientific speculation was at its highest point, and when 
education was conducted in its own vernacular and not through dead 
languages, science, industry, and commerce were actively prosperous. 
Corinth carried on the manufactures of Birmingham and Sheffield, while 
Athens combined those of Leeds, Staffordshire, and London, for it had 
woollen manufactures, potteries, gold and silver work, as well as ship- 
building. Their philosophers were the sons of burghers, and sometimes 
carried on the trades of their fathers. Thales was a travelling oil 
merchant, who brought back science as well as oil from Egypt. Solon 
and his great descendant Plato, as well as Zeno, were men of commerce. 
Socrates was a stone-mason ; Thucydides a gold-miner; Aristotle kept a 
druggist’s shop until Alexander endowed him with the wealth of Asia. 
All but Socrates had a superfluity of wealth, and he was supported by 
that of others. Now if our universities and schools created that love 
of science which a broad education would surely inspire, our men of 
riches and leisure who advance the boundaries of scientific knowledge 
could not be counted on the fingers as they now are, when we think of 
Boyle, Cavendish, Napier, Lyell, Murchison, and Darwin, but would be as 
numerous as our statesmen and orators. Statesmen, without a following 
of the people who share their views and back their work, would be feeble 
indeed. But while England has never lacked leaders in science, they have 
too few followers to risk a rapid march, We might create an army to 
support our generals in science, as Germany has done, and as France is now 
doing, if education in this country would only mould itself to the needs 
ofa scientificage. It is with this feeling that Horace Mann wrote :—‘ The 
action of the mind is like the action of fire ; one billet of wood will hardly 
burn alone, though as dry as the sun and north-west wind can make it, 
and though placed in a current of air; ten such billets will burn well 
together, but a hundred will create a heat fifty times as intense as ten— 
will make a current of air to fan their own flame, and consume even 
- greenness itself.’ 
1 VI. Abstract Science the Condition for Progress. 
The subject of my address has been the relations of science to the public 
weal. That is a very old subject to select for the year 1885. I began it 
_ by quoting the words of an illustrious prince, the consort of our Queen, 
who addressed us on the same subject from this platform twenty-six 
years ago. But he was not the first prince who saw how closely science 
