6 C. O. BURGE. 



more vivid and entertaining than any novel written since, 

 as an illustration of our subject. Odysseus, working 

 onward to his goal, but, even though he is called the man 

 of many devices, the engineer of his age, blindly falling into 

 difficulties, often of his own making, nevertheless ever 

 rescued and sustained by the fair goddess of all science, 

 the grey eyed Athene. 



The fairy tales of science may well be read for their own 

 sweet sake, but when studied with a utilitarian end in view 

 as in connexion with our subject, they have also their 

 absorbing interest. Huxley's definition of science was 

 ''Organized Common Sense," but though true, this does 

 not strike one as sufficiently distinctive, as this should 

 describe other subjects with which science has nothing to 

 do. The latter has one great distinction from those three 

 other subjects which so largely employ the human mind, 

 law, literature and art, that is the distinction of originality. 

 Law is chiefly made up of precedents ; listen to the finest 

 poetry of modern times, and, in the ears of those who 

 remember the ancient classics, familiar echoes are con- 

 stantly ringing ; in the great library of the British Museum 

 and in the Bibliotheque Nationale of Paris, we see crowds 

 of persons, called by courtesy, authors, constantly making 

 new books out of old ones. These are the importers and 

 retail tradesmen, not the producers of thought. A great 

 Elizabethan writer speaks of books as " Ships passing 

 through the vast seas of time, and making ages so distant, 

 to participate of the wisdom, the one of the other." But 

 he had only in view the classics of old, not those numerous 

 worthless productions of to day which might be fitly com- 

 pared to frail craft launched forth, to be wrecked on the 

 shores of time, through their own weakness and instability. 

 Greece and the middle ages have exhausted our ideas in 

 art and architecture, and the invention of a new archi- 



