from him."

For what more fit to knock the conceit out of a student, than being
pounded by these same hard facts--which tell him just enough to let
him know--how little he knows? What more fit to make a man patient,
humble, reverent, than being stopped short, as every man of science
is, after each half-dozen steps, by some tremendous riddle which he
cannot explain--which he may have to wait years to get explained--
which as far as he can see will never be explained at all?

The poet says: "An undevout astronomer is mad," and he says truth.
It is only those who know a little of nature, who fancy that they
know much. I have heard a young man say, after hearing a few
popular chemical lectures, and seeing a few bottle and squirt
experiments: Oh, water--water is only oxygen and hydrogen!--as if
he knew all about it. While the true chemist would smile sadly
enough at the youth's hasty conceit, and say in his heart: "Well,
he is a lucky fellow. If he knows all about it, it is more than I
do. I don't know what oxygen IS, or hydrogen, either. I don't even
know whether there are any such things at all. I see certain
effects in my experiments which I must attribute to some cause, and
I call that cause oxygen, because I must call it something; and
other effects which I must attribute to another cause, and I call
that hydrogen. But as for oxygen, I don't know whether it really
exists. I think it very possible that it is only an effect of
something else--another form of a something, which seems to make
phosphorus, iodine, bromine, and certain other substances: and as
for hydrogen--I know as little about it. I don't know but what all
the metals, gold, silver, iron, tin, sodium, potassium, and so
forth, are not different forms of hydrogen, or of something else