Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/402

390 seem to be very much wanted. While the investigation of nature and the interpretation of natural law arc admittedly among the highest, as they are among the most delightful of human occupations, the right application of natural law to effect desirable objects is in itself a scarcely less worthy occupation; many of these objects being of paramount importance, and attainable only by the exercise of high scientific sagacity and skill, aided by a fertility of resource and a persistent elasticity of spirit, ready ever to cope with the successive novel difficulties found to be continually opposing themselves.

In this matter, as in so many others, the sense of proportion is but too often lost sight of. Because the investigations of a Newton, a Darwin, a Dalton, a Joule, and a Faraday have an importance of which few among us can adequately conceive even the measurement; because among the scientific men now or but lately living in our midst are to be found those whose investigations in pure science have not only won for them a high renown, but have earned for them the gratitude, and should have obtained for them the substantial acknowledgments of their country and the world; and because even the minor investigations and discoveries that arc ever being made in pure science have all of them their merit and their value, it does not follow that the mere accomplishment, it may be in an abundant leisure, of two or three minor investigations, however creditably conducted, are to lift their authors into a scientific position, altogether above that of men whose laborious lives have been spent in rendering their great scientific attainments directly serviceable to the needs of the state and of the community. The accomplishment of such like investigations does not entitle their authors to claim exemption from the duty of earning their own livelihoods, or give them a claim to be endowed by the contributions of others with the means to jog leisurely along, without responsibilities and without anxieties, the far from thorny paths of their own predilection. However heterodox it may be thought by some, the best of all endowments for research is unquestionably that with which the searcher, relying on his own energies, succeeds in endowing himself. The work to which our natures are repugnant, not less than the work which entrances us and hardly makes itself felt as a work at all, has to be done. In some degree or other, we have most of us to obtain our own livelihood; and harsh as may seem the requirement, it will, I suppose, be conceded that the necessity put upon the mass of mankind, of having to earn their daily bread, is an arrangement of Providence which has, on the whole, worked fairly well; and further, that the various arrangements hitherto tried for exempting certain classes of men from the necessity of having to earn their daily bread, in order that they might give themselves up to the higher spiritual or intellectual life, have scarcely, to say the least of them, worked quite so satisfactorily as they were intended to. All of us are, without doubt, qualified for higher things than the mere earning