for the year 1885. xv 



years of valuable time in learned trifling, in elaborately 

 investigating matters of little or no real importance ? The 

 reply is, that the true philosopher seeks knowledge for its 

 own sake, and in finding it experiences the highest intel- 

 lectual joy. To him life is more than meat, and the body 

 than raiment ; and to explore the dim beginnings of organised 

 creatures in remote geological epochs, to observe the genesis 

 of a new world in some inconceivably distant region of 

 space, or to measure the size and investigate the properties 

 of the ultimate atoms of which the universe is built up, 

 affords a profound, a noble satisfaction, so that he is infinitely 

 happier amongst his formulae and specimens, his fossils and 

 re-agents, than, in their absence, the wealth of Croesus 

 could make him. 



But, further, it is to be observed that it not infrequently 

 happens that lines of investigation of the most apparently 

 useless kind ultimately lead to results of the highest practical 

 importance, which would have been altogether missed had 

 the investigator too anxiously asked, Cui bono ? at the outset. 

 Had the scientists of the centuries preceding our own not 

 faithfully and patiently laid the foundations of mathe- 

 matical and physical science, we should never have had the 

 wonderful practical developments which at the present time 

 are amongst the first necessities of life and the most potent 

 appliances of civilisation. They laboured, and we have 

 entered into their labours. Had they not spent precious 

 years upon apparently trivial inquiries as to why pumps would 

 not suck from a greater depth than thirty- three feet, or what 

 was the reason that the legs of a dead frog twitched when 

 touched with a piece of metal, we might not have had our 

 ocean steamships, our swift locomotives, or our wondrous 

 telegraphic system, permeating the whole civilised world as 

 the nerves do the sentient human body. All honour to the 

 worthies of old who, without the faintest presentiment of 

 the wonderful result, patiently and conscientiously did their 

 duty, and laid the foundations of the glorious temple of 

 science in which we, their happy successors worship. 



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