Town Geology | Page 4

in it. The discovery of chlorine by Scheele led to the invention of the modern processes of bleaching, and to various improvements in the dyeing of the textile fabrics, and has given employment to a very large number of our Lancashire operatives. The discovery of chlorine has also contributed to the employment of thousands of printers, by enabling Esparto grass to be bleached and formed into paper for the use of our daily press. The numerous experimental investigations in relation to coal-gas have been the means of extending the use of that substance, and of increasing the employment of workmen and others connected with its manufacture. The discovery of the alkaline metals by Davy, of cyanide of potassium, of nickel, phosphorus, the common acids, and a multitude of other substances, has led to the employment of a whole army of workmen in the conversion of those substances into articles of utility. The foregoing examples might be greatly enlarged upon, and a great many others might be selected from the sciences of physics and chemistry: but those mentioned will suffice. There is not a force of Nature, nor scarcely a material substance that we employ, which has not been the subject of several, and in some cases of numerous, original experimental researches, many of which have resulted, in a greater or less degree, in increasing the employment for workmen and others." {1}
"All this may be very true. But of what practical use will physical science be to me?"
Let me ask in return: Are none of you going to emigrate? If you have courage and wisdom, emigrate you will, some of you, instead of stopping here to scramble over each other's backs for the scraps, like black-beetles in a kitchen. And if you emigrate, you will soon find out, if you have eyes and common sense, that the vegetable wealth of the world is no more exhausted than its mineral wealth. Exhausted? Not half of it--I believe not a tenth of it--is yet known. Could I show you the wealth which I have seen in a single Tropic island, not sixty miles square--precious timbers, gums, fruits, what not, enough to give employment and wealth to thousands and tens of thousands, wasting for want of being known and worked-- then you would see what a man who emigrates may do, by a little sound knowledge of botany alone.
And if not. Suppose that any one of you, learning a little sound Natural History, should abide here in Britain to your life's end, and observe nothing but the hedgerow plants, he would find that there is much more to be seen in those mere hedgerow plants than he fancies now. The microscope will reveal to him in the tissues of any wood, of any seed, wonders which will first amuse him, then puzzle him, and at last (I hope) awe him, as he perceives that smallness of size interferes in no way with perfection of development, and that "Nature," as has been well said, "is greatest in that which is least." And more. Suppose that he went further still. Suppose that he extended his researches somewhat to those minuter vegetable forms, the mosses, fungi, lichens; suppose that he went a little further still, and tried what the microscope would show him in any stagnant pool, whether fresh water or salt, of Desmidiae, Diatoms, and all those wondrous atomies which seem as yet to defy our classification into plants or animals. Suppose he learnt something of this, but nothing of aught else. Would he have gained no solid wisdom? He would be a stupider man than I have a right to believe any of my readers to be, if he had not gained thereby somewhat of the most valuable of treasures--namely, that inductive habit of mind, that power of judging fairly of facts, without which no good or lasting work will be done, whether in physical science, in social science, in politics, in philosophy, in philology, or in history.
But more: let me urge you to study Natural Science, on grounds which may be to you new and unexpected--on social, I had almost said on political, grounds.
We all know, and I trust we all love, the names of Liberty, Equality, and Brotherhood. We feel, I trust, that these words are too beautiful not to represent true and just ideas; and that therefore they will come true, and be fulfilled, somewhen, somewhere, somehow. It may be in a shape very different from that which you, or I, or any man expects; but still they will be fulfilled.
But if they are to come true, it is we, the individual men, who must help them to come true for the whole world, by practising them ourselves, when and where we can. And I tell you--that in becoming scientific men, in