just in that proportion did they become able to explain and to conquer
disease. For there is a deep difference between the wonder of the
uneducated or half-educated man, and the wonder of the educated man.

The ignorant in all ages have wondered at the exception; the wise, in
proportion as they have become wise, have wondered at the rule.
Pestilences, prodigies, portents, the results of seeming accidents,
excite the vulgar mind. Only the abnormal or casual is worthy of their
attention. The man of science finds a deeper and more awful charm in
contemplating the results of law; in watching, not what seem to be
occasional failures in nature: but what is a perpetual and calm success.

The savage knows not, I am told, what wonder means, save from some
prodigy. Seeing no marvel in the daily glory of the sunlight, he is
startled out of his usual stupidity and carelessness by the occurrence of
an eclipse, an earthquake, a thunderbolt. The uneducated, whatever their
rank may be, are apt to be more interested by the sight of deformities,
and defects or excesses in nature, than by that of the most perfect
normal and natural beauty.

Those, in the same way, who in the infancy of European science, thought
it worth while to register natural phenomena, registered exclusively the
exceptions. Eclipses, meteors, auroras, earthquakes, storms, and
especially monstrosities, animal or vegetable, exercised their barbaric
wonder. The mystery and miracle which underlies the unfolding of every
bud, the development of every embryo, the growth of every atom of tissue,
in any organism, animal or vegetable--to all this their intellectual eye
was blind. How different from such a state of mind, that calm and
constant wonder, humbling and yet inspiring, with which the modern man of
science searches into the "open mystery" of the universe; and sees that