REPORT. 
11 
reason to be ashamed, and which has not failed to excite the 
admiration of visitors from other parts of the kingdom. 
There may be some, perhaps, who may regard the success 
of this appeal to the public with different feelings, and, in 
order to place it in an invidious light, may say that the sum 
which has been thus collected, might have been bestowed 
upon more useful objects. But it may be doubted whether 
they who would thus damp the zeal of the friends of 
science, have sufficiently weighed the real value of those 
pursuits, which they place so low in the scale of utility. 
If all the aids which human life has derived from 
philosophical speculation were to be lost, it would then be 
universally agreed, that the most useful of public institutions 
would be that which should have a tendency to replace 
them. Withdraw from the sailor the gifts which astronomy, 
and optics, and mechanical science have bestowed upon 
his perilous occupation; take away his chronometer, his 
telescope, and his quadrant; and you would make no amends 
to him for the security of which he has been divested, if you 
should even found a hospital for his reception. Deprive 
the miner of the safeguard by which experimental chemistry 
has of late years provided for his preservation; and the 
explosive atmosphere through which he now passes uninjured, 
will resume its destructive force, and leave no doubt of the 
utility of the science by which the blasts of death have been 
disarmed. 
The effect which the abstract meditations of philosophy 
have had upon the business and fortunes of mankind, is 
