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 houseful 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 patronise you, applaud you, ask you
to our houses; and you shall be clothed in purple and fine linen,
and fare sumptuously with us every day. I know not whether these
latter are not the worst enemies which science has. They are often
such excellent, respectable, orderly, well-meaning persons. They
desire so sincerely that everyone should be wise: only not too
wise. They are so utterly unaware of the mischief they are doing.
The