Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/403

Rh of our daily broad; but the discipline of having to earn our daily bread is, in more ways than one, a very wholesome discipline for the mass of us, and even for the best of us. It may here and there press hardly on particular natures, but it is rarely an impediment to the achievement of the highest things by those having the moral qualities, the judgment, the determination, and the self-denial necessary above everything else for their achievement. Not a few of us may consider ourselves fitted for higher work than the gods provide for us, and fondly imagine what great things we should effect if we could only have our daily bread supplied to us by the exertions and endowments of other less gifted mortals. But experience is not on the whole favorable to the view that, the conditions being provided, the expectation would be realized. Experience, indeed, rather favors the notion that it is primarily the necessity for work, and association with those under a necessity to work—those in whom a professional spirit has been aroused, and by whom work is held in honor—that creates and keeps up the taste and the habit of work, whereby the vague ambition to achieve is turned to some productive account. Take, say, a thousand of the most eminent men the world has produced, and, making no allowance for the large influence of descent or training, or of association with those to whom work is a necessity, or, having been a necessity, has become a habit, consider what proportion of these men have, by their means and position in early life, been free from any stimulus or obligation to exert and cultivate their powers; and consider, on the other hand, what proportion of them have been stimulated to exertion and success by the stern necessity of having either to achieve their own careers, or to drop into insignificance, if not indeed into actual or comparative degradation and poverty. We ought, indeed, all of us to be students, and to be above all things students; but the most of us can not be, nor is it desirable, save in the case of a special few, that we should be only students. We have all our duties to fulfill in this world, and it is not the least of these duties to render ourselves independent of support from others, and able ourselves to afford support to those depending upon us. Fortunate are we in being able to find our means of support in the demand that exists for the applications of a science which has for its cultivators so great a charm. To judge, however, not indeed by their coyness when exposed to the occasional temptation of professional work, but rather by their observations on the career of others, the most sought after and highest in professional repute, the pursuit of professional chemistry is, in the opinion of some among us, a vocation open to the gravest of censure. It is praiseworthy, indeed, for the man of science to contribute to his means of livelihood by the dreary work of conducting examinations in elementary science for all sorts of examining-boards, and by teaching elementary science at schools and colleges, and by giving popular expositions of science at public institutions, and by exchanging a minor