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tigation was tlie spirit of accurate and careful observa ■ 
tion. Those who gave any portion of their time to those 
inquiries must not think that science was a thing to be 
taken up like a novel, and read hastily, or investigated in a 
superficial manner. If the study of science were to do any 
good to themselves or to the general knowledge of the world 
in regard to those inquiries to which they addressed them- 
selves, it must be conducted in a painstaking manner, and 
whatever they did, be it much or little, they should do with 
all their might, and with the utmost thoroughness they could 
command. Loose knowledge, superficial inquiry, the lazy 
readiness to accept facts without complete investigation, 
or an obstinate rejection of facts because they did not accord 
with their preconceived ideas or the theories they were in- 
clined to favour themselves, he took it were habits of 
mind which were fatal to scientific inquiry — and it was 
only by cultivating a difierent spirit — by approaching 
nature in a reverent spirit, desiring to learn the lessons 
which she had to teach, and believing that these lessons were 
only to be learned by careful investigation, and by reverent 
study — it was only in that mode that any of them could hope 
to derive any solid profit from studies of this descrip- 
tion. The true spirit, then, of an investigator of nature — 
be he student or be he teacher — was, he ventured to think, 
a modest, teachable, reverent spirit — a mind open to re- 
ceive all facts from whatever quarter they might come; 
ready to test them to the utmost, and ready to accept 
the conclusions to which these facts might lead. It had 
always seemed to him important to all engaged in these 
investigations ever to keep distinctly in mind the almost 
infinite difierence which there was between fact and theory. 
The foundation of all true science was fact, and it had been 
by the investigation of facts — the careful, painstaking, 
minute, individual investigation of facts — that science had 
