Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/496

480 report some years ago to the Massachusetts Board of Health, that the average longevity, which at Geneva, in the time of the Reformation, was 21·21 years, between 1814 and 1833 had increased to 40·68, and that as many people would live to seventy as reached forty, three hundred years ago. The records of annuities on life show the same fact, proving, strange as it may appear, that within the last three centuries the average period of human existence has nearly doubled.

While those cognizant of such facts realize the benefits resulting from the applications of science, we sometimes hear it urged that such things are effected by the work of practical men, and that the theorists are useless. A more absurd and misleading idea was never expressed in words, and yet it is taken up and believed by people who never stop to question its truthfulness. In this respect it stands on a par with many an adage that passes current to-day. What, for instance, could be more fallacious than that "Contentment is better than riches," "Murder will always out," or "Brave men are never cruel," when history furnishes the records of Marius, Sulla, Haynau, and Napoleon, men whose courage was never doubted, but who were guilty of acts of cruelty that would disgrace any age? Absurd and untruthful as are these sayings, they are no more so than the statement that any class of men studying science can be set down as theorists who are of no benefit to humanity.

This can be made more apparent by the consideration of a few incidents in the lives of great men. For instance, John Hunter spent a large portion of his time in acquiring knowledge of anatomical facts which were regarded as useless by his so-called practical associates. He was a man who believed that no knowledge was unworthy of attention, and consequently dug deep into the foundations of his favorite science. By such studies he learned how the arteries changed, and that, when the main trunk was obstructed, the collateral branches enlarged sufficiently to carry on the circulation. At first this knowledge did not admit of any practical application. Finally, a patient came to him with an aneurism upon a branch artery. Hunter was thus given and embraced the opportunity of demonstrating the practicalness of his apparently visionary study, inasmuch as he at once boldly tied the main artery, which, up to that time, no surgeon had ever dared to do. The result was that the patient's life was saved, and a new and valuable operation introduced into the science of surgery.

Linnæus, more than a century ago, was spending his time in the visionary pursuit of bug-hunting, when the Swedish