taxed, should be paid like any other honest account, in a simple and business-like manner. The toiler in the workshop of science who reveals a new truth is a benefactor to the whole of mankind, has a fair and honest claim against the whole human race, and is entitled to draw a bill accordingly, which should be accepted and honored by his own country at least. Decent gratitude and common honesty demand so much from the nation. It should be done, and may be done, without opening a door to jobbery or any multiplication of corrupt and idle pensioners." I fear that though this might, perhaps, be managed in Utopia or the New Atlantis, it could scarcely be effected in England or any other country at present existing. The accounts that would be handed in to the minister of science under any such system would present a strange medley of real and false discoveries. His time would be chiefly occupied in objecting to undue estimates of results, and in endeavoring (hopelessly) to settle rival claims of contending discoverers. Besides, it is absolutely impossible to devise any scale of valuation for scientific discoveries. Conceive the state of mind of the minister of science, who, after disposing of claims for the quadrature of the circle, the discovery of perpetual motion, new cosmogonies, schemes of weather prediction, and the like, should suddenly find himself called upon to decide the money value of some great achievement in science, such as Newton's discovery of universal gravitation, or Kirchhoff's interpretation of the solar spectrum.
Whether the intrinsic value of any result, or the time and labor it had cost, were considered, the difficulty of determining how much should be paid for it would be alike insuperable. If the former were the test, who should determine the intrinsic value? The discoverer might perhaps overrate it, or, if he were really an earnest student of science, he would either underrate it, or be unwilling to make any claim at all. Others would, for the most part, be unable to estimate the result at its true worth, if it were really a discovery of importance. For the discoverer must commonly be in advance of his fellow-workers in the department of research to which his discovery belongs. He alone knows the relation of his discovery to work already accomplished in the same direction. Let any specialist, who has just obtained some notable result, be asked to name half a dozen experts in his own subject to whose opinion he would be willing to submit his discovery, and it will be found that he will with difficulty name half as many, and those not specially eminent in that subject.
As to the amount of time and labor devoted to any subject of scientific research, it is tolerably certain that the nation would object to any system of retrospective endowment based on that criterion. The ardent student of science gives many more hours of his time to his favorite subject of research than any government would be willing to pay for, at the present day, or for many years to come.
Past experience, not in scientific matters alone or chiefly, but gen-
