ON THE ADVISABLENESS OF IM- 

 PROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 1 



THIS time two hundred years ago in the beginning 

 of January, 1666 those of our forefathers who in- 

 habited this great and ancient city, took breath between 

 the shocks of two fearful calamities: one not quite past, 

 although its fury had abated; the other to come. 



Within a few yards of the very spot on which we are 

 assembled, so the tradition runs, that painful and deadly 

 malady, the plague, appeared in the latter months of 

 1664; and, though no new visitor, smote the people of 

 England, and especially of her capital, with a violence 

 unknown before, in the course of the following year. 

 The hand of a master has pictured what happened in 

 those dismal months; and in that truest of fictions, "The 

 History of the Plague Year," Defoe shows death, with 

 every accompaniment of pain and terror, stalking 



1 This lay sermon was delivered in St. Martin's Hall, January 

 7, 1866, and was subsequently published in the Fortnightly Re- 

 view and in Methods and Results, Collected Essays, I. Twelve 

 years earlier Huxley had delivered in the same place an address 

 On the Educational Value of the Natural History Sciences in 

 which he advanced similar ideas. He said of the scientific method 

 on that occasion: "So far as I can arrive at any clear compre- 

 hension of the matter, Science is not, as many would seem to 

 suppose, a modification of the black art, suited to the tastes of 

 the nineteenth century, and flourishing mainly in consequence of 

 the decay of the Inquisition. 



"Science is, I believe, nothing but trained and organised com- 

 mon sense, differing from the latter only as a veteran may differ 

 from a raw recruit." Science and Education, Collected Essays, 



ni: 4 s. 



16 



