THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 1869
THE DULLNESS OF SCIENCE
We have all heard of the fox who, when he had lost his own tail, tried to prevail upon his eomrades to dispense with theirs ; and we think it must surely have been in a congress of the blind that the question was first started, “Is it dull to use your eyes and look about you?”
For, in fact, what is science but this? We came unexpectedly into a greal mansion, of which we know nothing ; and if it be dull to seek out the various inmates of the house, and to ascertain its laws and regulations, then is science dull; but if this be important and interesting, then so also is science interesting.
But, alas! the blind in this sense are numbered by myriads ; and as they, for a time, almost threaten to earry their point, a few remarks upon the dulness of science, or rather, perhaps, the dulness of men, may not be out of place.
We have in our mind’s eye at the present moment several notable specimens of blind men. One of these lives not very far from where we write—a most hopeless individual ; we had better not inquire too narrowly concerning his occupation ; he will be found somewhere in the purliews of this great city. His one sense is the sense of fain. We remember once seeing through a microscope the animalcules of a drop of water, and we noticed that one of the largest of these had one end fixed to the side of the vessel, while its arms and mouth were busy gathering up and swallowing its smaller neighbours. Now, the man of whom we speak is only this animalcule magnified without the mieroscope. Ignorant of all laws, civil, religious, physical, moral, social, sanatory, he rots in his place until Dame Nature, in one of her clearing-out days, fetches at him with her besom the plague ; and he is swept aside and seen no more.
Our country readers are no doubt well acquainted with Farmer Hodge. One day he happened to sit next the poet Coleridge, listening, with that reverence for his betters to which he had been early trained, to the marvellous sayings of the great man, and it was only when the apple dumpling made its appearance that he exclaimed, “ Them’s the jockeys for me!” Hodge, we fear, maintains no sort of relations with the universe around him. He farms in the same way in which his grandfather did, and has the most profound aversion for the steam plough,
He told Tennyson—
“But summa’ ull come ater meä mayhap wi’ ‘is kittle o’ steäm, Huzzin’ an’ maäzin the blessed fealds wi’ the Divil’s oän team. Gin T mun doy I mun doy, an’ loife they says, is sweet ; But gin I mun doy I mun doy, for I couldn abear to see it.”
Nevertheless, Hodge has some sense of his duty to his neighbour, Indeed, we learn from D'Arcy Thompson, that being once asked What is thy duty towards thy neighbour? he wrote as follows upon a slate :—
“My duty lords my nabers, is to love him as thyself, and to do to all men as I wed thou shall do and to me, to love, onner and suke my farther and mother, to onner and to bay the Queen, and all that are pet in a forty under her, to smit myself to all my gooness, teaches, sportial pastures and marslers, to oughltn myself lordly and every to all my betters, to hut nobody by would nor deed, to be trew in jest in all my deelins, to beer no malis nor ated in yours arts, to kep my hands from pecken and steel, my turn from evil speaking, lawing and slanders, not to civet nor desar othermans good, but to laber trewly to git my own leaving, and to my dooty in that state if life, and to cach it is please God to call men.”
Ascending in the scale, we come next to our friend “Cui Bono ;” a very good sort of man, very fussy, very philanthropic, and very short-sighted,—in fact, he sees nothing distinctly that is more than one inch from his face. He called upon us the other day to give us a little good ‘advice: it was about the time when our astronomers were investigating the chromosphere of the sun. “What,” he asked, “is the use of all this? will it put one peany in your pocket or mine? will it help to feed, or clothe, or educate your family or mine? Take my advice, sir, and have nothing to do with it.” We did not reply to him; indeed we learned afterwards that he had just written an article on the subject in one of the journals, Next day he called upon us in a state of high jubilation; he had just seen a friend of his who had succeeded in making a useful appleation of some great discovery, which, being within the requisite inch, was clearly perceived by “Cui Bono”— “A very useful and practical discovery, sir, which will greatly alleviate human suffering; none of your hydrogen-in-the-sun business.” And so the successful adapter got all the praise, while the wretched man of science who discovered the principle was left out in the cold.
Still ascending in the scale, we come to a man of strong mental eyesight, but without leisure to use it; one that it makes us grieve to see, inasmuch as he is capable of far better things. His ears are not altogether stopped to the mighty utterance that all nature gives, nor yet is he wholly ignorant, when at night he looks upwards, of that which the firmament declares; but its utterance is drowned in the tumult of a great city, while its starlight is quenched in the smoke. Our sentiment for such a man is that of pity; for indeed, what with the cares of this world and the deccitfulness of riches, he has a hard battle to fight.
But is it not melancholy to reflect how great a proportion of the energy of this country is devoted to the acquisition of gain, and how small a proportion to the acquisition of knowledge ?
We have now arrived at the ranks of the affluent and the nobly-born, where, if anywhere, we might expect to find “tastes refined by reading and study, and judgments matured by observation and experience ;” but how seldom is this the case? The mental eyesight is often weak to begin with, and often is it rendered still weaker by poring over classics without end. The unfortunate youth is then sent to make the tour of Europe. He is sent to Switzerland and the Alps to see all that is grand in nature, and to Rome and Paris to see all that is great in art, and he comes home wretched and disgusted, and no wonder. He has been made the unfortunate subject of a senseless experiment—an experiment much the same as that of turning a man with weak eyes into a picture gallery in order to improve them. His friends forget that appreciation of the beautiful and the true is the product of the coming together of two things—eyesight and nature. In fact, the result is much the same, whether a man with no eyes is carried out into a glorious
