tion, and in quiet and
peace, undisturbed by the turmoil about them, pursue those noble
quests which give to humanity its highest training! What these men
lose we know: to them are neither great houses nor the hoards of
successful commerce. Their lives are often vexed by the trouble and
worry of wretchedly incompetent incomes, and what trials they endure
those they love must also share. Their incomes, in fact, are usually
such as a well-paid bank-clerk or dry-goods salesman would despise.
Officers of the navy or army are, as a rule, as well paid as men of
science who hold the chairs of teachers; but while the former class
are the most signal and steady grumblers, the latter are, of all the
men I know, the most tranquilly content. What they miss in life we can
well imagine; what they gain the general public little comprehends;
but those who know them best will readily understand why it is that
their lives are seemingly so happy.

And here, again, I would remind the reader that the class I speak of
are not the mere college professors, useful as they are, but those
men, in or out of that class, whose lives are devoted to the
acquisition of facts fresh from Nature--to the original study of bird
and beast and stone and flower--and those who, on a yet higher plane
of work, are busy with the patient investigation of physics and
physiology. Such men do not rely for success in their pursuits on
their knowledge of human nature, or the passions and foibles and lower
wants of their fellows, but, for ever turning toward a more quiet
life, are living among those strange problems which haunt the
naturalist, or among those awful forces which rule the stars and
pervade the dead and living world of matter. There must be something
quieting and ennobling in this steady contemplation of vast
machineries, which have all the force and terror of human passions,
and yet the serene steadiness and certainty of unchanging law. It is
"a purer ether, a diviner air," from whence its citizens can afford to
look down in peace, perhaps in scorn, upon the ignoble strifes beneath
them.

I suppose, too, that other men can hardly dream of the one vast
pleasure which comes to these searchers when ever so little a new
truth or a fresh analogy reaches them as the result of their work. The
pursuit itself is all absorbing, all exacting, and when at last the
purpose is attained, and out of darkness flashes the light of some
novel law, the knowledge of some new