pon our
attention, and has worked miracles which have modified the whole
fashion of our lives.

[Sidenote: These results often too much regarded;]

What wonder, then, if these astonishing fruits of the tree of
knowledge are too often regarded by both friends and enemies as the
be-all and end-all of science? What wonder if some eulogise, and
others revile, the new philosophy for its utilitarian ends and its
merely material triumphs?

[Sidenote: for scientific research rarely directed to practical ends]

In truth, the new philosophy deserves neither the praise of its
eulogists, nor the blame of its slanderers. As I have pointed out, its
disciples were guided by no search after practical fruits, during the
great period of its growth, and it reached adolescence without being
stimulated by any rewards of that nature. The bare enumeration of the
names of the men who were the great lights of science in the latter
part of the eighteenth and the first decade of the nineteenth
century, of Herschel, of Laplace, of Young, of Fresnel, of Oersted, of
Cavendish, of Lavoisier, of Davy, of Lamarck, of Cuvier, of Jussieu,
of Decandolle, of Werner and of Hutton, suffices to indicate the
strength of physical science in the age immediately preceding that of
which I have to treat. But of which of these great men can it be said
that their labors were directed to practical ends? I do not call to
mind even an invention of practical utility which we owe to any of
them, except the safety lamp of Davy. Werner certainly paid attention
to mining, and I have not forgotten James Watt. But, though some of
the most important of the improvements by which Watt converted the
steam-engine, invented long before his time, into the obedient slave
of man, were suggested and guided by his acquaintance with scientific
principles, his skill as a practical mechanician, and the efficiency
of Bolton's workmen had quite as much to do with the realisation of
his projects.

[Sidenote: but instigated by love of knowledge]

In fact, the history of physical science teaches (and we cannot too
carefully take the lesson to heart) that the practical advantages,
attainable through its agency, never have been, and never will be,
sufficiently attractive to men inspired by the inborn genius of the
interpreter of nature, to give them courage to undergo the toils and
make the sacrifices which that calling requires from its votaries.
That which stirs their pulses is the love