to your self-interest to support and cherish them. But I should despise myself for appealing to such a motive, and you for requiring it. The supreme importance of science and scholarship to a nation does not depend in the least on the circumstance that important practical results may follow. When, as in the case of Galvani's frogs, they come in the order of Providence, let us thank God for them as a gift which we had no right either to expect or demand. Science, if studied successfully, must be studied for the pure love of truth; and, if we serve her solely for mercenary ends, her truths, the only gold she offers, will turn to dross in our hands, and we shall degrade ourselves in proportion as we dishonor her. Galvani, and Volta, and Oersted, who discovered the truths of which the electric telegraph is a simple application, sure to be made as soon as the time was ripe, are not the less to be honored because they died before the fullness of that time had come. We honor them for the truths they discovered, and the lustre of their consecrated lives could be neither enhanced nor impaired by subsequent events; and it is because I am persuaded that such lives are the salt of the world, the saviors of society, that I would lead you to cherish and sustain them; and, that I may enforce this conclusion, allow me to ask your attention to another historical incident, which presents a striking parallelism to the last.
I must take you back to a period which we, of a nation born but yesterday, regard as distant, but which was one of the most noted epochs of modern history—the age of Luther and the Reformation. I must ask you to accompany me to the small town of Allenstein, near Frauenberg, in Eastern Prussia, where, on the 23d of May, 1543, there lay dying one of the great benefactors of mankind. This man, old at seventy years, "bent and furrowed with labor, but in whose eye the fire of genius was still glowing," was then known as one of the most learned men of his time. Doctor of Medicine as well as of Theology, Canon of Frauenberg, Honorary Professor of Bologna and Rome, while devoting his leisure to study, he had passed a life of active benevolence in administering to the bodily as well as the spiritual wants of the ignorant people among whom his lot had been cast. He was also a great mechanical genius, and, by various labor-saving machines, of his own invention, he had contributed greatly to the welfare of the surrounding country; but the superstitious peasants, although they had hitherto reverenced the great man as their best friend and benefactor, had been recently incited by his enemies and rivals in the Church to curse him as a heretic and a wizard. A few days back he had been the unwilling witness of one of those out-of-door spectacles, so common at that time, in which his scientific opinions had been travestied, his charities ridiculed, and his devoted life made the object of slander and reproach. This ingratitude of his flock had broken his heart, and he could not recover from the blow.
