MICHAEL FARADAY--SIR WILLIAM SIEMENS--M. PASTEUR.
The loftiest class of scientists pursue science because they love truth. They derive no animation from the thought of any practical application which they can make from their scientific discoveries. They have no dreams of patents and subsequent royalties, although these sometimes come. They enter upon their work, smit with a passion for truth. If to any one of them it should happen to be pointed out--as Sir Humphrey Davy showed the ardent young Michael Faraday--at the beginning of his career, that science is a hard mistress who pays badly, they are so in love with science that, really and truly, they prefer from their very hearts to live with her on bread and water in a garret to living without her in palaces in which they might fare sumptuously every day.
There are others by whom science is regarded only in the measure of its fruitfulness in producing material wealth. Their great men are not the discoverers of principles, but the inventors, the men who can apply the discoveries of others to supplying such wants as men are willing to pay largely to have satisfied. As has been said--
"To some she is the goddess great;
To some the milch-cow of the field;
Their business is to calculate
The butter she will yield."
Our highest admiration must be for the discoverers; but we may do well to remind ourselves, from time to time, that to such men we are indebted not only for thrilling insight into the beautiful mysteries of nature, and for the withdrawal of the veil which shuts out from ordinary sight the august magnificences of nature, but also for the discovery of those principles which can be turned to the best practical account, ministering to us in our kitchens and bed-chambers and drawing-rooms and factories and shops and fields, filling our nights with brilliancy and our days with potencies, giving to each man the capability of accomplishing in one year what his ancestors, who lived in unscientific ages, could not have achieved in twenty; not only exhibiting the forces of nature as steeds, but also showing how they may be harnessed to the chariots of civilization.
To keep us in healthful gratitude to the men who, having turned away from the marts of the money-makers, have unselfishly set themselves to discover what will enrich the money-makers, and, content to live in simple sorts of ways, have sent down beauty and comfort into the homes of rich and poor, it is well to make an occasional résumé of the results of the work of useful scientists, and ponder the lessons of their single-mindedness.