the realization of the advantages is so
distant, that the amount of discount is coextensive with the debt: it
is only as the applications of science become more immediate, that the
cultivators of science can reasonably expect an adequate reward or
appreciation.

Even when practically applied, we too frequently see that the original
discoveries of the physical philosopher are but little valued by those
who make a daily, a most extensive, and a most lucrative use of their
results. Men _talk_ of "a million;" how few have ever _counted_ one!
Men walk along the Strand, Fleet Street, Ludgate Hill; how few think
of the multiplied passions and powers which flit by them on their
way--of the separate world which surrounds each passer-by--of the
separate history, external and internal, of each--each possessing
feelings, motives of action, characters, differing from the others, as
the stamp of nature on his brow differs from his fellows! Thus, also,
men's ears ring with the advancement of science, men's beards wag
with repetition of the novel powers which have been educed from
material nature; and if, in our daily traffic, we traverse without
attention countless sands of thought, how much more, in our hackneyed
talk of science, do we neglect the debt we owe to thought--thought,
not the mere normal impulse of humanity, but the carefully elaborated
lucubration of minds, of which the term _thinking_ is emphatically
predicable! Names which are met with but once in the annals of
science, and there, dimly seen as a star of the least magnitude, have
perhaps earned that remote and obscure corner by painful self-denial,
by unwearied toil! And yet not only these, but others who have added
to diligence high mental acumen or profundity, whose wells of thought
are, compared with those of the general mass, unfathomable, earn but a
careless, occasional notice--are known but to few of those who daily
reap the harvest which they have sown, and who even boast of seeing
further than they did, as the dwarf on the shoulders of a giant can
see further than the giant. The first step of the unthinking is to
deny the possibility of a given discovery, the next is to assert that
any one could have foreseen such discovery.

There are, however, points of higher import than gain or glory to
which the philosopher must ever look, and the absence of which must be
a source of bitter disappointment and ground of just complaint. The
most important of these is, tha