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onward things more remote from our knowledge." In his " Areopagitica," we have 

 a stimulus of another kind — " Give me the liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely, 

 according to conscience, above all liberties." 



Macaulay, in his essay on the poet Montgomery, gives utterance to a cognate 

 idea when he says — " Men are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when they 

 discuss it freely." 



And Gladstone taught us the value of enthusiasm, without which no progress can 

 be made in science — " ' It is a pity Gladstone puts so much heat, so much irritability 

 into business. Now I (Sir George Lewis) am as cool as a fish.' The worst of being as 

 cool as a fish is that you never get great things done, you effect no improvements and 

 you carry no reforms, against the lethargy or selfishness of men and the tyranny of 

 old custom." (Morley's " Life of Gladstone," i, 519.) 



And yet " So many worlds, so much to do. 



So little done . . ." (Canto 73, Tennyson's " In Memoriam.") 



And in order to keep a man of science humble, when he has got a few facts 

 together and publishes some conclusions concerning them, we are reminded — " That 

 is the worst of erudition — that the next scholar sucks the few drops of honey that you 

 have accumulated, sets right your blunders, and you are superseded." (A. C. Benson, 

 " From a College Window "— " Books.") 



A further check to personal pride is the thought which has been selected as the 

 motto of this work — that the best men do but add a very little to the pile of knowledge. 

 Another phase of the same idea is conveyed in the following : — " All beginnings are, 

 obscure ; something is borrowed from the past, and something is invented for the future 

 till it is vain to fix the gradations of invention which terminate in what at length becomes 

 universally adopted." (Isaac DTsraeli, " Amenities of Literature," Earl of Surrey 

 and Sir Thomas Wyatt.) 



We are searching after the truth, although we proceed by different ways, and 

 the great gift is the spirit of truth or " candour." " Candour is a very essential part 

 of a naturalist, and this accomplishment our great countryman, Mr. Ray (the seventeenth 

 century botanist) possessed in an eminent degree ; and that rendered him so excellent. 

 If a man was never to write on natural knowledge till he knew everything, he would 

 never write at all, and therefore a readiness to acknowledge mistakes on due conviction 

 is the only certain path to perfection." (Gilbert White, of Selborne, in " Life and 



