t)2 THE JUST CLAIMS OF NATURAL SCIENCE. 



conjectures ; they are the necessary and temporary 

 scaffolding by which, at last, the construction of the real 

 law is to be attained. The detective who, after looking 

 at all the minute facts, carefully frames an hypothesis by 

 which to explain them, is the one who, working on this, 

 or perhaps, subsequently, on some better framed hy- 

 pothesis, is going to unravel the mystery ; and thus 

 alone can he hope to unravel it. 



Instead of being a reproach, the pow T er to originate a 

 reasonable working hypothesis is a rare gift, and there- 

 fore a glory in scientific research ; while he who at last 

 comes through the workings and experiments with 

 theories and hypotheses into the establishment of natural 

 law, has placed the human mind on a higher plane of 

 intellectual culture. 



Now these processes and these achievements of intel- 

 lectual victories are all the while taking place in scien- 

 tific research, whether the w T orld knows it or not ; and 

 whether inventive practical discoveries of economic value 

 to man result from them or not. They are the higher 

 results, adding continually to the intellectual mastery 

 of man, of which scientists have a right to be proud. 

 They are infinitely higher in quality than the material, 

 money-coining inventions that flow from them. As far 

 as the true merit of the achievement goes, I would rather 

 have been the inventor of the "nebular hypothesis," 

 with all the stimulus to thought and research which it 

 has inspired every since, than to have invented the 

 steam-engine. In the same view, I had rather have been 

 the discoverer of Ohm's law of electric intensity, or of 

 Crooke's theory of radiant matter, than even Pough- 

 keepsie's justly honored citizen who, by the application 

 of such laws already established, elaborated the electric 

 telegraph. 



Again, I may justly claim, as no small part of the use- 

 fulness of science, that it stimulates workers in other 



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