Note 1 — LETTER IV.

No, I assure you, knowledge by itself will not make you happy; still less will it make you rich. Perhaps you thought I was writing carelessly when I told you, last month, “science did not pay.” But you don’t know what science is. You fancy it means mechanical art; and so you have put a statue of Science on the Holborn Viaduct, with a steam-engine regulator in its hands. My ingenious friends, science has no more to do with making steam-engines than with making breeches; though she condescends to help you a little in such necessary (or it may be, conceivably, in both cases, sometimes unnecessary) businesses. Science lives only in quiet places, and with odd people, mostly poor. Mr. John Kepler, for instance, who is found by Sir Henry Wotton “in the picturesque green country by the shores of the Donau, in a little black tent in a field, convertible, like a windmill, to all quarters, a camera-obscura, in fact. Mr. John invents rude toys, writes almanacks, practises medicine, for good reasons, his encouragement from the Holy Roman Empire and mankind being a pension of 18l. a year, and that hardly ever paid.”1 That is what one gets by star-gazing, my friends. And you cannot be simple enough, even in April, to think I got my three thousand pounds’-worth of minerals by studying mineralogy? Not so; they were earned for me by hard labour; my father’s in England, and many a sun-burnt vineyard-dresser’s in Spain.