improvement of our knowledge of Nature, and the extent to which that
improved knowledge has been incorporated with the household words of
men, and has supplied the springs of their daily actions.

Granting for a moment, then, the truth of that which the depreciators of
natural knowledge are so fond of urging, that its improvement can only
add to the resources of our material civilization; admitting it to be
possible that the founders of the Royal Society themselves looked for
no other reward than this, I cannot confess that I was guilty of
exaggeration when I hinted, that to him who had the gift of
distinguishing between prominent events and important events, the
origin of a combined effort on the part of mankind to improve natural
knowledge might have loomed larger than the Plague and have outshone
the glare of the Fire; as a something fraught with a wealth of
beneficence to mankind, in comparison with which the damage done by
those ghastly evils would shrink into insignificance.

It is very certain that for every victim slain by the plague, hundreds
of mankind exist and find a fair share of happiness in the world by the
aid of the spinning jenny. And the great fire, at its worst, could not
have burned the supply of coal, the daily working of which, in the
bowels of the earth, made possible by the steam pump, gives rise to an
amount of wealth to which the millions lost in old London are but as an
old song.

But spinning jenny and steam pump are, after all, but toys, possessing
an accidental value; and natural knowledge creates multitudes of more
subtle contrivances, the praises of which do not happen to be sung
because they are not directly convertible into instruments of creating
wealth. When I contemplate natural knowledge squandering such gifts