man working at science, however dull and dirty
his work may seem at times, is like one of those "chiffoniers," as they
call them in Paris--people who spend their lives in gathering rags and
sifting refuse, but who may put their hands at any moment upon some
precious jewel. And not only may you be able to help your neighbours to
find out what will give them health and wealth: but you may, if you can
only get them to listen to you, save them from many a foolish experiment,
which ends in losing money just for want of science. I have heard of a
man who, for want of science, was going to throw away great sums (I
believe he, luckily for him, never could raise the money) in boring for
coal in our Bagshot sands at home. The man thought that because there
was coal under the heather moors in the North, there must needs be coal
here likewise, when a geologist could have told him the contrary. There
was another man at Hennequin's Lodge, near the Wellington College, who
thought he would make the poor sands fertile by manuring them with whale
oil, of all things in the world. So he not only lost all the cost of his
whale oil, but made the land utterly barren, as it is unto this day; and
all for want of science.

And I knew a manufacturer, too, who went to bore an Artesian well for
water, and hired a regular well-borer to do it. But, meanwhile he was
wise enough to ask a geologist of those parts how far he thought it was
down to the water. The geologist made his calculations, and said:

"You will go through so many feet of Bagshot sand; and so many feet of
London clay; and so many feet of the Thanet beds between them and the
chalk: and then you will win water, at about 412 feet; but not, I think,
till then."

The well-sinker laughed at that, and said, "He had no opinion of
geologists, and such-like. He never found any clay in England but what
he could get through in 150 feet."

So he began to bore--150 feet, 200, 300: and then he began to look rather
silly; at last, at 405--only seven feet short of what the geologist had
foretold--up came the water in a regular spout. But, lo and behold, not
expecting to have to bore so deep, he had made his bore much too small;
and the sand out of the Thanet beds "blew up" into the bore, and closed
it. The poor manufacturer spent hundreds of pounds more in trying to get
the sand out, but in vain; and he had at last to make a fresh and much
larger well by the side of the old one, bewailing