Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/716

698 is described in "Nature" as having been "a very stirring and noble one, full of sound sense as to the recent humiliation and present condition of France, enthusiasm toward science, and faith in it as one of the most powerful regenerators of the country. "Science is at present supreme," he said; "she is becoming more and more the sovereign of the world." And he believed that it would be only when all ranks and classes of the people, rulers and ruled, were thoroughly imbued with the scientific spirit and were guided by scentificscientific [sic] knowledge that France would ever again take and maintain the supreme place in the world which she ought to hold.

At the second meeting of this Association, held in August, 1873, at Lyons, M. de Quatrefages was president. In his opening address he pointed out the almost inconceivable advance that science had made during the past century, and the importance of scientific education. In speaking of the latter subject, he said that the devotees of literature accused Science of stifling the imagination. "'She kills,' they say, 'the ideal, and stunts intelligence by imprisoning it within the limits of reality; she is incompatible with poetry.' The men who speak thus have never read Kepler the astronomer, Linnæus the naturalist, Buffon the zoölogist, Humboldt the universal savant. What! Science stifle sentiment, imagination, she who brings us every hour into the presence of wonders! She lower intelligence, who touches on all the infinities! When literary students and poets know Science better, they will come and draw from her living fountain. Like Byron of our time, like Homer of yore, they will borrow from her striking imagery descriptions whose grandeur will be doubled by their truth. Homer was a savant for his time. He knew the geography, the anatomy of his era; we find in his verses the names of islands and capes, technical terms like clavicle and scapula. None the less, he wrote the 'Iliad.' No, the study of science will never suppress the genius of an inspired poet, of a true painter, of a great sculptor. But she will bring more light to the path of an erring soul. She will, perhaps, transform into a wise man, or at least into a citizen useful to himself and others, one who without her would only have been one of those pretended incomprehensible geniuses, designed to perish of misery, of impotency, and of pride. While fully admitting the important place of literature in education, he would wish to see children initiated at an early age into the facts, the ideas, and the methods of science.

"Governments, such as they have hitherto been, have almost always acted as if they had no need for the men who study Nature and her forces. But when any critical or important event occurs, then it is found necessary to appeal to them. Of whom are the juries of international exhibitions composed? No doubt each state sends its worthy merchants, its tried chiefs of industry, its eminent agriculturists, but it also, and above all, sends its men of science. At these important times peoples are comparing their real strength, and each feels that