SCIENCE AND ETHICS. 485 
tion, and their wages depended on their skill. Our utilisation of machinery is 
causing that class to be a diminishing one, although samples still remain. Take 
the village smith, for example. He has to meet all kinds of unexpected situa- 
tions—to repair an agricultural machine, to set a kitchen boiler in order, to 
patch up a bicycle, to shoe a refractory horse; and I believe that, in conse- 
quence, he is not only the most intelligent but also the happiest man in his 
district. The men in the motor-repairing shops scattered about the country are 
of the same type, and in increasing the numbers of such workers, who 
have to give intelligence to their tasks, the motor-car has rendered real national 
service. 
Nevertheless, the whole tendency of modern industry is to deprive the 
labourer of all initiative or interest in his work. Can we wonder if he yields 
to any temptation which may introduce some human variety into his life? 
Give these men some knowledge of the machinery that they use; an idea of the 
manner in which it came into being, and the laws which govern its actions; 
give them something to think about when at work; in fact, make them feel that 
although they cannot, like the skilled engineer, be the masters, they are not 
the slaves of their machines, and you will raise a generation of more intelligent, 
more contented, and, therefore, more valuable citizens. 
Lastly, I plead for a greater diffusion of natural knowledge, for the reason— 
an ethical reason and in itself a sufficient reason—that it would bestow increased 
happiness and loftier aspirations on mankind. The world he lives in would 
become to every man a place of increasing and widening interest as his know- 
ledge expanded. Familiarity with nature never ‘breeds contempt,’ or if it 
does so I am afraid it is only in our relations with our fellow men. 
‘There need not schools, nor the Professor’s chair, 
Though these be good, true wisdom to impart ; 
He, who has not enough for these to spare 
Of time or gold, may yet amend his heart, 
And teach his soul, by brooks and rivers fair : 
Nature is always wise in every part.’! 
Those who, like myself, have little acquaintance with the biological sciences 
must feel that the walks abroad of the botanist and zoologist are to them a 
source of pleasure to which we are strangers. ‘To Peter— 
‘A primrose by a river’s brim, 
A yellow primrose was to him, 
And it was nothing more,’ 
but to the artist it is a thing of beauty, while to the artist who is also a botanist 
it must be more—a cause of wonder. 
Objects from which some of us naturally shrink—objects of horror—creeping 
things ‘that crawl with legs upon a slimy sea’—are to the zoologist, acquainted 
with their history and variety, a source of both interest and delight. 
The admiration of the anatomist for the structure and beauty of the human 
body must increase with every organ he dissects. 
A lump of coal, to the stoker merely ‘something to burn,’ is to the chemist a 
casket from which can be extracted many products useful to man, and to the 
geologist it is an historical document. 
To the mineralogist a crystal is one of the most wonderful and, he has 
reason to believe, one of the most significant, of all structures. 
To the physicist every block of apparently inert matter tells wondrous stories. 
As he reflects on its ultimate atoms, their infinite number and the forces binding 
them all together; as with increasing knowledge he considers these almost 
inconceivably minute entities as in themselves miniature solar systems contain- 
ing hitherto unsuspected stores of energy, energy beside which that of our coal- 
fields sinks into insignificance, is it strange that, having passed through the 
first stage of wonder which, as Coleridge says, is ‘the child of ignorance,’ he 
should have attained the second stage at which wonder becomes the ‘ parent 
of adoration’? 
1 Lord Thurlow. 
