needed; can you not get
them by the co-operative method, which has worked so well in other
matters? Can you not form yourselves into a Natural Science club,
for buying such things and lending them round among your members; and
for discussion also, the reading of scientific papers of your own
writing, the comparing of your observations, general mutual help and
mutual instructions? Such societies are becoming numerous now, and
gladly should I see one in every town. For in science, as in most
matters, "As iron sharpeneth iron, so a man sharpeneth the
countenance of his friend."

And Brotherhood: well, if you want that; if you want to mix with
men, and men, too, eminently worth mixing with, on the simple ground
that "a man's a man for a' that;" if you want to become the
acquaintances, and--if you prove worthy--the friends, of men who will
be glad to teach you all they know, and equally glad to learn from
you anything you can teach them, asking no questions about you, save,
first--Is he an honest student of Nature for her own sake? And next-
-Is he a man who will not quarrel, or otherwise behave in an
unbrotherly fashion to his fellow-students?--If you want a ground of
brotherhood with men, not merely in these islands, but in America, on
the Continent--in a word, all over the world--such as rank, wealth,
fashion, or other artificial arrangements of the world cannot give
and cannot take away; if you want to feel yourself as good as any man
in theory, because you are as good as any man in practice, except
those who are better than you in the same line, which is open to any
and every man; if you wish to have the inspiring and ennobling
feeling of being a brother in a great freemasonry which owns no
difference of rank, of creed, or of nationality--the only
freemasonry, the only International League which is likely to make
mankind (as we all hope they will be some day) one--then become men
of science. Join the freemasonry in which Hugh Miller, the poor
Cromarty stonemason, in which Michael Faraday, the poor bookbinder's
boy, became the companions and friends of the noblest and most
learned on earth, looked up to by them not as equals merely but as
teachers and guides, because philosophers and discoverers.

Do you wish to be great? Then be great with true greatness; which
is,--knowing the facts of nature, and being able to use them. Do you
wish to be strong? Then be strong with true str