Presidential Address British Association for the Advancement of Science, Section A; Nature, Vol. 8 (1873), p. 450.
[1543]. The silent work of the great Regiomontanus in his chamber at Nuremberg computed the Ephemerides which made possible the discovery of America by Columbus.—Rudio, F.
Quoted in Max Simon’s Geschichte der Mathematik im Altertum (Berlin, 1909), Einleitung, p. xi.
[1544]. The calculation of the eclipses of Jupiter’s satellites, many a man might have been disposed, originally, to regard as a most unprofitable study. But the utility of it to navigation (in the determination of longitudes) is now well known.—Whately, R.
Annotations to Bacon’s Essays (Boston, 1783), p. 492.
[1545]. Who could have imagined, when Galvani observed the twitching of the frog muscles as he brought various metals in contact with them, that eighty years later Europe would be overspun with wires which transmit messages from Madrid to St. Petersburg with the rapidity of lightning, by means of the same principle whose first manifestations this anatomist then observed!...
He who seeks for immediate practical use in the pursuit of science, may be reasonably sure, that he will seek in vain. Complete knowledge and complete understanding of the action of forces of nature and of the mind, is the only thing that science can aim at. The individual investigator must find his reward in the joy of new discoveries, as new victories of thought over resisting matter, in the esthetic beauty which a well-ordered domain of knowledge affords, where all parts are intellectually related, where one thing evolves from another, and all show the marks of the mind’s supremacy; he must find his reward in the consciousness of having contributed to the growing capital of knowledge on which depends the supremacy of man over the forces hostile to the spirit.—Helmholtz, H.
Vorträge und Reden (Braunschweig, 1884), Bd. 1, p. 142.
[1546]. When the time comes that knowledge will not be sought for its own sake, and men will not press forward simply in a desire of achievement, without hope of gain, to extend the limits of human knowledge and information, then, indeed, will the race enter upon its decadence.—Hughes, C. E.