t is used.

Sydney Smith was speaking of the Elementary School, and, indeed,
was urging the claims of the working classes to better education.
But his doctrine applies with at least equal force to the higher
and wider ranges of knowledge. During the Victorian Age physical
science came into its own, and a good deal more than its own. Any
discovery in mechanics or chemistry was hailed as a fresh boon,
and the discoverer was ranged, with Wilberforce and Shaftesbury,
among our national heroes. As long ago as 1865 a scientific soldier
perceived the possibilities of aerial navigation. His vision has
been translated into fact; but Count Zeppelin has shown us quite
clearly that the discovery is not an unmixed blessing. Chemistry
is, to some minds, the most interesting of studies, just because
it is, as Lord Salisbury once said of it, the science of things
as they are. Yet aconitine, strychnine, and antimony have played
their part in murders, and chloroform has been used for destruction
as well as for salvation. Dr. Lardner was one of the most conspicuous
figures in that March of Mind which Brougham and his congeners
led; and his researches into chemistry resulted in the production
of an effluvium which was calculated to destroy all human life
within five miles of the spot where it was discharged. This was
an enlargement of knowledge; but if there had been Nihilists in
the reign of William IV. they would have found in Dr. Lardner's
discovery a weapon ready to their hand. Someone must have discovered
alcohol; and my teetotal friends would probably say, invented it,
for they cannot attribute so diabolical an agency to the action of
purely natural causes. But even those who least sympathize with
"the lean and sallow abstinence" would scarcely maintain that alcohol
has been an unmixed blessing to the race.

To turn from material to mental discoveries, I hold that a great
many additions which have been made to our philosophical knowledge
have diminished alike the happiness and the usefulness of those
who made them. "To live a life of the deepest pessimism tempered
only by the highest mathematics" is a sad result of sheer knowledge.
An historian, toiling terribly in the muniment-rooms of colleges
or country houses, makes definite additions to our knowledge of
Henry VIII. or Charles I.; learns cruelty from the one and perfidy
from the other, and emerges with a theory of government as odious
as Carlyle's or Froude's. A young student