MODERN METHODS OF SCIENCE. 581 
fields of research so enticing that their entire lives may become 
absorbed in them. This is increasing every day in our country, 
and before very long there will be such inducements to offer to 
her greater minds to devote their lives to pure science that 
America will become as prolific in new scientific ideas and discov- 
eries as Europe. 
Let us ever bear in mind that it is abstract scientific ideas which 
underlie, in these modern days, all discoveries conducive to man’s 
progress, from the making of a pen to the construction of a tele- 
scope; or, as Herbert Spencer well expresses it, ‘* each machine 
is a theory before it becomes a concrete fact.” The man of pure 
science paves the way, erects the mile-stones, and puts up the 
_ guide-post for the practical man. The world, long dormant to 
this great truth, is fast waking up to its acknowledgment; as 
those words Cui bono? (the touch-stone used by the so-called 
practical men) are only heard now in faint whispers, where they 
were formerly sounded most clamorously whenever any scientific 
discovery was announced. 
This does not arise from any change in men; they are the same 
now as they were in the days of Galvani, who was doubtless re- 
garded as a frivolous fellow, engaged in his daily experiments over 
. the convulsions of the muscles in a frog’s leg when brought in con- 
tact with two metals; but, while mankind has not changed, Gal- 
vani’s experiment has, and instead of a frog being conyulsed by 
the electric force then discovered it is a world that is now con- 
vulsed, as this same electricity flashes through those nerves of 
metal that stretch across land and river and bury themselves deep 
beneath the oceans of our globe; battles are fought, victories an- 
nounced, commerce controlled, and, I am sorry to say, tyranny 
abetted, by that wonderful agent whose phenomena in their incip- 
iency invited the ridicule of the ordinary observer. 
Science at the present day commands the respect of the world ; 
nations, looking up to it, seek its advice at all times, and move 
in no material enterprises without consulting its oracles; yellow- 
= Covered literature is beginning to find a rival in well-conducted 
aera scientific journals and popular treatises on the various 
ches of science. : 
s an association of American scientists, we are looked upon 
as men representing science in all its bearings upon the physical 
and mental world, and some even go so far as to suppose that we 
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