connecting link, some simple
explanation of a range of facts or phenomena, or even the discovery of
a fresh analogy or homology, or of an undescribed fossil being, the
purity of the pleasure which they win is something which to be
understood must have been felt. "I think," said Jeffries Wyman once to
the writer, "that the most happy and heartfilling thing in the world
is to come face to face with something which no one but God ever saw
before." How transcendent must have been this form of joy when it
rewarded the first who saw the spectrum analysis of starlight in its
fullness of meaning, or to him who first knew where and how the blood
runs its wonderful courses!

Then, too, the life of other men, of the merchant and the lawyer,
palls as age advances and its rewards are paid in dollars or in honor.
Their experiences are limited and work out, but the naturalist or
investigator only gathers day by day new interests about his life of
duties. His work is as pleasant as play, and his play is usually only
some new form of work. Nature is his--a mistress whose charms are
unfading, and who is his for life. Go to some meeting of men of
science and see how this is. The oldest has as keen a zest as the
youngest, and while life becomes to others a weariness, to these men
the pleasure in their steady work is absolutely unfailing. I heard the
other day a half-jesting remark at a dinner-table of men of science to
the effect that life might become a tiresome thing as we grew older.
"Not for me," said one of them, whose name is known wherever science
is held in honor: "there must be no end of Rhizopods I have never
studied." Thus it is that men who live ever gazing at the surely
widening horizon of truth, who know that they at least need never sigh
for new worlds to conquer, who day by day are coming into closer
company with the yet unwhispered thoughts of the great Maker, are
happy and contented in the tasks to which their lives are given, and
serenely patient of what their duties deny them of luxury and wealth
and freedom to wander or to rest.

It might well be thought that men living so far apart from the general
paths, and pursuing purposes so remote from those of the trader, would
become obnoxious to that bitterest of American reproaches, the charge
of being unpractical. The directness of aim of scientific training and
the lofty code of honor among students of science, with their fair
share of cis-Atlantic pliability, makes the