them as they deserve. Young as you are, too, you have a recompense in
your power: one more acceptable even than Academic prizes--of which
it is indispensable not to be too avaricious--you can give them your
love.

Besides, it is not only hands but heads that are at work for you, and
of these many more than you suppose; and your debt of gratitude is as
much due to the one as to the other.

Perhaps my first letter may have led you to suppose that I was inclined
to laugh at what I called learned men; and they are perhaps a little
to blame for not thinking often enough about little girls; but
nevertheless these men are of the greatest use to them in an indirect
way. You owe them much, therefore, and without them could have known
nothing of what I am teaching you. It is very grand for us, is it not,
to know that there is phosphorus and lime in our teeth? But it took
generations of learned men, and investigations and discoveries without
end, and ages of laborious study, to extract from nature this secret
which you have learnt in five minutes. And whatever others you may
learn hereafter, remember that it is the same story with all. While
profiting, therefore, at your ease, by all these conquests of science,
I would have you hold in grateful recollection those who have gained
them at so much cost to themselves: almost always at the expense of
their fortune, sometimes at the peril of their lives.

There they are, observe, a little knot of men with no sort of outward
pretension. They speak a language which scares children away. They
weigh dirty little powders in apothecaries' scales; steep sheets of
copper in acid-water; and watch air-bubbles passing through bent glass
tubes, some of which are as dangerous as cannon balls. They scrape old