of the greatest talent.  The statesman endeavoured to show that we ought not to be surprised at this result, because in our day the reign of theoretic science yielded place to that of applied science.  Nothing could be more erroneous than this opinion, nothing, I venture to say, more dangerous, even to practical life, than the consequences which might flow from these words.  They have rested in my mind as a proof of the imperious necessity of reform in our superior education.  There exists no category of the sciences, to which the name of applied science could be rightly given. We have science, and the applications of science, which are united together as the tree and its fruit.’

And Cuvier, the great comparative anatomist, writes thus upon the same theme:  ’These grand practical innovations are the mere applications of truths of a higher order, not sought with a practical intent, but pursued for their own sake, and solely through an ardour for knowledge.  Those who applied them could not have discovered them; but those who discovered them had no inclination to pursue them to a practical end.  Engaged in the high regions whither their thoughts had carried them, they hardly perceived these practical issues though born of their own deeds.  These rising workshops, these peopled colonies, those ships which furrow the seas—­this abundance, this luxury, this tumult—­all this comes from discoveries in science, and it all remains strange to the discoverers.  At the point where science merges into practice they abandon it; it concerns them no more.’

When the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth Rock, and when Penn made his treaty with the Indians, the new-comers had to build their houses, to cultivate the earth, and to take care of their souls.  In such a community science, in its more abstract forms, was not to be thought of.  And at the present hour, when your hardy Western pioneers stand face to face with stubborn Nature, piercing the mountains and subduing the forest and the prairie, the pursuit of science, for its own sake, is not to be expected.  The first need of man is food and shelter; but a vast portion of this continent is already raised far beyond this need.  The gentlemen of New York, Brooklyn, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington have already built their houses, and very beautiful they are; they have also secured their dinners, to the excellence of which I can also bear testimony.  They have, in fact, reached that precise condition of well-being and independence when a culture, as high as humanity has yet reached, may be justly demanded at their hands.  They have reached that maturity, as possessors of wealth and leisure, when the investigator of natural truth, for the truth’s own sake, ought to find among them promoters and protectors.