nd necromancers of various sorts, who having for their own
purposes set forth partial, ill-grounded, fantastic, and frightful
interpretations of nature, have no love for those who search after a
true, exact, brave, and hopeful one. And therefore it is to be feared,
or hoped, science and superstition will to the world's end remain
irreconcilable and internecine foes.

Conceive the feelings of an old Lapland witch, who has had for the last
fifty years all the winds in a sealskin bag, and has been selling fair
breezes to northern skippers at so much a puff, asserting her powers so
often, poor old soul, that she has got to half believe them
herself,--conceive, I say, her feelings at seeing her customers watch the
Admiralty storm-signals, and con the weather reports in the 'Times.'
Conceive the feelings of Sir Samuel Baker's African friend, Katchiba, the
rain-making chief, who possessed a whole housefull of thunder and
lightning--though he did not, he confessed, keep it in a bottle as they
do in England--if Sir Samuel had had the means, and the will, of giving
to Katchiba's Negros a course of lectures on electricity, with
appropriate experiments, and a real bottle full of real lightning among
the foremost.

It is clear that only two methods of self-defence would have been open to
the rain-maker: namely, either to kill Sir Samuel, or to buy his real
secret of bottling the lightning, that he might use it for his own ends.
The former method--that of killing the man of science--was found more
easy in ancient times; the latter in these modern ones. And there have
been always those who, too good-natured to kill the scientific man, have
patronised knowledge, not for its own sake, but for the use which may be
made of it; who would like to keep a tame man of science, as they would a
tame poet, or a tame parrot; who say--Let us have science by all means,
but not too much of it. It is a dangerous thing; to be doled out to the
world, like medicine, in small and cautious doses. You, the scientific
man, will of course freely discover what you choose. Only do not talk
too loudly about it: leave that to us. We understand the world, and are
meant to guide and govern it. So discover freely: and meanwhile hand
over your discoveries to us, that we may instruct and edify the populace
with so much of them as we think safe, while we keep our position
thereby, and in many cases make much money by your science. Do that, and
we will patronis