In the works of these men you have all the materials employed at this hour, in all the forms of the electric telegraph.  Nay, more; Gauss, the illustrious astronomer, and Weber, the illustrious natural philosopher, both professors in the University of Goettingen, wishing to establish a rapid mode of communication between the observatory and the physical cabinet of the university, did this by means of an electric telegraph.  Thus, before your practical men appeared upon the scene, the force had been discovered, its laws investigated and made sure, the most complete mastery of its phenomena had been attained—­nay, its applicability to telegraphic purposes demonstrated—­by men whose sole reward for their labours was the noble excitement of research, and the joy attendant on the discovery of natural truth.

Are we to ignore all this?  We do so at our peril.  For I say again that, behind all our practical applications, there is a region of intellectual action to which practical men have rarely contributed, but from which they draw all their supplies.  Cut them off from this region, and they become eventually helpless.  In no case is the adage truer, ‘Other men laboured, but ye are entered into their labours,’ than in the case of the discoverer and applier of natural truth.  But now a word on the other side.  While practical men are not the men to make the necessary antecedent discoveries, the cases are rare, though, in our day, not absent, in which the discoverer knows how to turn his labours to practical account.  Different qualities of mind and habits of thought are usually needed in the two cases; and while I wish to give emphatic utterance to the claims of those whose position, owing to the simple fact of their intellectual elevation, is often misunderstood, I am not here to exalt the one class of workers at the expense of the other.  They are the necessary complements of each other.  But remember that one class is sure to be taken care of.  All the material rewards of society are already within their reach, while that same society habitually ascribes to them intellectual achievements which were never theirs.  This cannot but act to the detriment of those studies out of which, not only our knowledge of nature, but our present industrial arts themselves, have sprung, and from which the rising genius of the country is incessantly tempted away.

Pasteur, one of the most illustrious members of the Institute of France, in accounting for the disastrous overthrow of his country, and the predominance of Germany in the late war, expresses himself thus:  ’Few persons comprehend the real origin of the marvels of industry and the wealth of nations.  I need no further proof of this than the employment, more and more frequent, in official language, and in writings of all sorts, of the erroneous expression applied science.  The abandonment of scientific careers by men capable of pursuing them with distinction, was recently deplored in the presence of a minister