Child, there is no saying what you might find out, or of what use you may be to your fellow-men.  A man working at science, however dull and dirty his work may seem at times, is like one of those “chiffoniers,” as they call them in Paris—­people who spend their lives in gathering rags and sifting refuse, but who may put their hands at any moment upon some precious jewel.  And not only may you be able to help your neighbours to find out what will give them health and wealth:  but you may, if you can only get them to listen to you, save them from many a foolish experiment, which ends in losing money just for want of science.  I have heard of a man who, for want of science, was going to throw away great sums (I believe he, luckily for him, never could raise the money) in boring for coal in our Bagshot sands at home.  The man thought that because there was coal under the heather moors in the North, there must needs be coal here likewise, when a geologist could have told him the contrary.  There was another man at Hennequin’s Lodge, near the Wellington College, who thought he would make the poor sands fertile by manuring them with whale oil, of all things in the world.  So he not only lost all the cost of his whale oil, but made the land utterly barren, as it is unto this day; and all for want of science.

And I knew a manufacturer, too, who went to bore an Artesian well for water, and hired a regular well-borer to do it.  But, meanwhile he was wise enough to ask a geologist of those parts how far he thought it was down to the water.  The geologist made his calculations, and said: 

“You will go through so many feet of Bagshot sand; and so many feet of London clay; and so many feet of the Thanet beds between them and the chalk:  and then you will win water, at about 412 feet; but not, I think, till then.”

The well-sinker laughed at that, and said, “He had no opinion of geologists, and such-like.  He never found any clay in England but what he could get through in 150 feet.”

So he began to bore—­150 feet, 200, 300:  and then he began to look rather silly; at last, at 405—­only seven feet short of what the geologist had foretold—­up came the water in a regular spout.  But, lo and behold, not expecting to have to bore so deep, he had made his bore much too small; and the sand out of the Thanet beds “blew up” into the bore, and closed it.  The poor manufacturer spent hundreds of pounds more in trying to get the sand out, but in vain; and he had at last to make a fresh and much larger well by the side of the old one, bewailing the day when he listened to the well-sinker and not to the geologist, and so threw away more than a thousand pounds.  And there is an answer to what you asked on board the yacht—­What use was there in learning little matters of natural history and science, which seemed of no use at all?  And now, look out again.  Do you see any change in the country?

What?