Even in Great Britain—­and yet more in Germany and France—­the habits of life make it less of a sacrifice than here for men to abandon all that money gives and to devote themselves to the quiet life of the closet and the laboratory.  Once set in a groove, the average man abroad is less apt, to seek to rise out of it or depart from it; while with us the constant flow of a too intensely active life is for ever luring men with baits of greed to take the easy step aside from pure science into the golden ways of gain.  Honored be they in this land of eager money-getting who withstand the temptation, and in quiet and peace, undisturbed by the turmoil about them, pursue those noble quests which give to humanity its highest training!  What these men lose we know:  to them are neither great houses nor the hoards of successful commerce.  Their lives are often vexed by the trouble and worry of wretchedly incompetent incomes, and what trials they endure those they love must also share.  Their incomes, in fact, are usually such as a well-paid bank-clerk or dry-goods salesman would despise.  Officers of the navy or army are, as a rule, as well paid as men of science who hold the chairs of teachers; but while the former class are the most signal and steady grumblers, the latter are, of all the men I know, the most tranquilly content.  What they miss in life we can well imagine; what they gain the general public little comprehends; but those who know them best will readily understand why it is that their lives are seemingly so happy.

And here, again, I would remind the reader that the class I speak of are not the mere college professors, useful as they are, but those men, in or out of that class, whose lives are devoted to the acquisition of facts fresh from Nature—­to the original study of bird and beast and stone and flower—­and those who, on a yet higher plane of work, are busy with the patient investigation of physics and physiology.  Such men do not rely for success in their pursuits on their knowledge of human nature, or the passions and foibles and lower wants of their fellows, but, for ever turning toward a more quiet life, are living among those strange problems which haunt the naturalist, or among those awful forces which rule the stars and pervade the dead and living world of matter.  There must be something quieting and ennobling in this steady contemplation of vast machineries, which have all the force and terror of human passions, and yet the serene steadiness and certainty of unchanging law.  It is “a purer ether, a diviner air,” from whence its citizens can afford to look down in peace, perhaps in scorn, upon the ignoble strifes beneath them.