Doubtless this accusation will always be brought against science by those who confound reverence with fear.  For from blind fear of the unknown, science does certainly deliver man.  She does by man as he does by an unbroken colt.  The colt sees by the road side some quite new object—­a cast-away boot, an old kettle, or what not.  What a fearful monster!  What unknown terrific powers may it not possess!  And the colt shies across the road, runs up the bank, rears on end; putting itself thereby, as many a man does, in real danger.  What cure is there?  But one; experience.  So science takes us, as we should take the colt, gently by the halter; and makes us simply smell at the new monster; till after a few trembling sniffs, we discover, like the colt, that it is not a monster, but a kettle.  Yet I think, if we sum up the loss and gain, we shall find the colt’s character has gained, rather than lost, by being thus disabused.  He learns to substitute a very rational reverence for the man who is breaking him in, for a totally irrational reverence for the kettle; and becomes thereby a much wiser and more useful member of society, as does the man when disabused of his superstitions.

From which follows one result.  That if science proposes—­as she does—­to make men brave, wise, and independent, she must needs excite unpleasant feelings in all who desire to keep men cowardly, ignorant, and slavish.  And that too many such persons have existed in all ages is but too notorious.  There have been from all time, goetai, quacks, powwow men, rain-makers, and necromancers of various sorts, who having for their own purposes set forth partial, ill-grounded, fantastic, and frightful interpretations of nature, have no love for those who search after a true, exact, brave, and hopeful one.  And therefore it is to be feared, or hoped, science and superstition will to the world’s end remain irreconcilable and internecine foes.

Conceive the feelings of an old Lapland witch, who has had for the last fifty years all the winds in a sealskin bag, and has been selling fair breezes to northern skippers at so much a puff, asserting her powers so often, poor old soul, that she has got to half believe them herself,—­conceive, I say, her feelings at seeing her customers watch the Admiralty storm-signals, and con the weather reports in the ‘Times.’  Conceive the feelings of Sir Samuel Baker’s African friend, Katchiba, the rain-making chief, who possessed a whole housefull of thunder and lightning—­though he did not, he confessed, keep it in a bottle as they do in England—­if Sir Samuel had had the means, and the will, of giving to Katchiba’s Negros a course of lectures on electricity, with appropriate experiments, and a real bottle full of real lightning among the foremost.