the subject which engages them, and they expound them in the vernacular tongue. Scientific pursuits then follow a freer and a safer course, but a less lofty one.
The mind may, as it appears to me, divide science into three parts.
The first comprises the most theoretical principles, and those more abstract notions, whose application is either unknown or very remote.
The second is composed of those general truths, which still belong to pure theory, but lead nevertheless by a straight and short road to practical results.
Methods of application and means of execution make up the third.
Each of these different portions of science may be separately cultivated, although reason and experience show that none of them can prosper long, if it be absolutely cut off from the two others.
In America the purely practical part of science is admirably understood, and careful attention is paid to the theoretical portion which is immediately requisite to application. On this head the Americans always display a clear, free, original, and inventive power of mind. But hardly any one in the United States devotes himself to the essentially theoretical and abstract portion of human knowledge. In this respect the Americans carry to excess a tendency which is, I think, discernible, though in a less degree, amongst all democratic nations.
Nothing is more necessary to the culture of the higher sciences, or of the more elevated departments of science, than meditation; and nothing is less suited to meditation than the structure of democratic society. We do not find there, as amongst an aristocratic people, one class which clings to a state of repose because it is well off; and another, which does not venture to stir because it despairs of improving its condition. Every one is actively in motion: some in quest of power, others of gain. In the midst of
