40 
TRANSACTIONS OF THE TEXAS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 
vance, of the utility of the results that he may reach than has anybody 
else;—he does not even know what the results will be. And it is well 
that he does not care, for the prepossession would inevitably become a 
mental bias which sooner or later would be sure to lead him astray. The 
question contains another mistaken implication; for it assumes that some 
knowledge is useless. If we were to understand that nothing is useful 
which does not immediately contribute to the board, clothing and lodg¬ 
ing of mankind, the implication might be justified. To the mere dollar - 
hunter, or to the man with the pick and shovel, it may be a matter of 
the profoundest indifference what is the sun’s distance from the earth, 
what are the affinities between two families of plants, or what are the 
relative ages of two beds of limestone or shale. Perceiving no relation 
between them and dollars or cents, they are useless questions. But the 
term utility has a far wider significance to the more enlightened, for it 
means to them the capacity for ministering to human desire. And it is 
comforting to know that the number of men is not small who desire 
knowledge for its own sake, with a love for it as strong as any appetite 
for dainty food or fine raiment, or as the laboring man’s love for his 
grimy tobacco pipe or his pot of beer. If there is utility in the knowl¬ 
edge which facilitates the production or improves the quality of food 
and clothing, or of tobacco and refreshing beverages, why is there no 
utility in the knowledge which is suited only to the hunger, the craving, 
the thirst for knowledge for its own sake ? In the broader sense of the 
term, therefore, all knowledge is useful. 
The division of labor then, between the discoverer of new knowledge 
and the inventor who seeks new utilities for the material and commercial 
benefit of mankind, is for the best. In the final outcome the results of 
both are the greatest possible and the progress is the most rapid. In this 
division however, the discovery of new truths is antecedent and the in¬ 
vention of utilities is consequent. And here we come upon a considera¬ 
tion which the unlearned or unscientific perceive only very dimly or not 
at all. 
It is well enough known to nearly all people of education that inven¬ 
tions in electric appliances such as are now rapidly multiplying, would 
have been impossible without the pre-existence of such discoveries as 
those of Volta, Arago, Peltier, Ampere, Ohm, Faraday, Weber, Thomson, 
and Henry and a host of others whose names have become immortal. 
Nor could such an invention as the steam engine have been possible 
without a previous knowledge of the properties of elastic vapors; nor 
could the compound engine in its present form have been invented without 
a still more advanced knowledge of the laws of thermodynamics and of 
the conservation of energy. But of all fields of applied science that 
■which presents the greatest number of inventions is that of industrial 
