"You are perfectly right in your remarks," said Bacon, as I paused. "From my own personal knowledge of what has come to pass in the field of industry during the last two centuries, I could adduce a good many more examples to show that many of your nineteenth-century discoveries, which for a long time afterwards merely bore a purely scientific significance or character, have now become prolific sources of material benefit to society at large. Nor does any one now-a-days doubt the importance of pure science; all governments look upon it as an urgent duty on their part to promote the same wherever they can; nor is it too anxiously asked whether it does bear, in every instance, immediate results to benefit the material condition of society. Moreover, it should not be here forgotten that every man of judgment and discrimination has long since learned to see that the furtherance of material advantages as the aim and end of human endeavours is an idea as narrow in itself as it is unworthy of rational beings. Surely there exists another and infinitely higher mainspring of happiness in the enjoyment of gathering such knowledge as will enable us to perceive the causal connection between the phenomena of nature, or teach us the history of man and all his surroundings. The pursuit of material gratification is essentially a thing which man shares with the brute; but our desire to ennoble that which is spiritual or immaterial in us--that is exclusively human; the gratification of such desire is the genuine 'trade-mark' of real civilization. So much is the bulk of modern society already convinced of these truths, that no government could now-a-days afford to neglect the encouragement of scientific pursuit, although the utmost discretion be left to the men of science themselves with regard to the other question: how and in what direction the extension of knowledge ought to take place." "Then you hear nothing more now of what was once termed 'official science'?" "I really do not know," said Bacon, "what you are alluding to; but if you use the word 'official' in its usual acceptation--meaning that which can no longer be doubted, since it emanated from a responsible government--then, my dear sir, you will pardon me the remark that the expression is anything but felicitous, nay, very shallow indeed. A government may protect, support, and promote science, but it can never stamp it with the seal of genuineness. Such seal is held by truth alone!" Somewhat ashamed of my apparently antiquated notions and childish observations, I walked on in silence until Miss Phantasia all of a sudden exclaimed: "Here we have actually got to the exhibition of Heliochromes; oh, do let us go in. I should very much like to know whether they come at all up to those enormous golden placards outside, and whether the highest of the fine arts is here equalled by reality."