er order, not sought with a practical intent, but
pursued for their own sake, and solely through an ardour for
knowledge. Those who applied them could not have discovered them; but
those who discovered them had no inclination to pursue them to a
practical end. Engaged in the high regions whither their thoughts had
carried them, they hardly perceived these practical issues though
born of their own deeds. These rising workshops, these peopled
colonies, those ships which furrow the seas--this abundance, this
luxury, this tumult--all this comes from discoveries in science, and
it all remains strange to the discoverers. At the point where science
merges into practice they abandon it; it concerns them no more.'

When the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth Rock, and when Penn made
his treaty with the Indians, the new-comers had to build their houses,
to cultivate the earth, and to take care of their souls. In such a
community science, in its more abstract forms, was not to be thought
of. And at the present hour, when your hardy Western pioneers stand
face to face with stubborn Nature, piercing the mountains and subduing
the forest and the prairie, the pursuit of science, for its own sake,
is not to be expected. The first need of man is food and shelter; but
a vast portion of this continent is already raised far beyond this
need. The gentlemen of New York, Brooklyn, Boston, Philadelphia,
Baltimore, and Washington have already built their houses, and very
beautiful they are; they have also secured their dinners, to the
excellence of which I can also bear testimony. They have, in fact,
reached that precise condition of well-being and independence when a
culture, as high as humanity has yet reached, may be justly demanded
at their hands. They have reached that maturity, as possessors of
wealth and leisure, when the investigator of natural truth, for the
truth's own sake, ought to find among them promoters and protectors.

Among the many problems before them they have this to solve, whether
a republic is able to foster the highest forms of genius. You are
familiar with the writings of De Tocqueville, and must be aware of the
intense sympathy which he felt for your institutions; and this
sympathy is all the more valuable from the philosophic candour with
which he points out not only your merits, but your defects and
dangers. Now if I come here to speak of science in America in a
critical and captious spirit, an invisible radiation