Perhaps this is not to be wondered at; for Parliament always contains many lawyers, and at the moment, I think, not a single scientific expert, at least among the Commons. This is not really a sordid argument, though it may appear so. The labourer, after all, is worthy of his hire; but in the scientific world it very, very seldom happens that the hire is worthy of the labourer. Even to this day there is plenty of truth in the description of the attitude of Mr. Meagles towards Mr. Doyce as detailed by the author of _Little Dorrit_. Perhaps that is partly because it is generally the man of business, and not the unhappy man of science, who gains the money produced by scientific discoveries. These are often, if not usually, made by accident, and by a man on the track of something else, on the elucidation of which he is probably so intent that he cannot spare time for side-issues, very likely never even thinks of them. Sir James Dewar discovered the principle of the "Thermos flask" whilst he was working at the exceedingly difficult subject of the liquefaction of air. I hope Sir James had the prescience to patent his discovery, and reap the reward which was due to him; but, if he did, he is one amongst a thousand who never took this trouble and of whom _Sic vos non vobis_ might well be said. When Sabatier had shown the importance of combinations of hydrogen effected by what is known as a catalyst, numerous patents were taken out--by other people, of course--on which were founded very flourishing businesses. Sabatier profited by none of these--so I understand. He received a Nobel prize for his discoveries; but another hath his heritage. Though science has not received any great encouragement, yet in spite of that--the cynic might say because of that--it has made amazing progress during the past half-century. Mr. Chesterton somewhere notes that "a time may easily come when we shall see the great outburst of science in the Nineteenth Century as something quite as splendid, brief, unique, and ultimately abandoned as the outburst of art at the Renaissance." That, of course, may be so, but as to the outburst there can be no question, nor of its persistence to the present day. That also is surely a curious phenomenon; for, as regards most other things, we seem to be in the trough of the wave, and not merely in these islands but all over the civilised world. In Art, in Music, in Literature, in the Drama, it would be difficult to argue in favour of a pre-eminence, or even of an equality of the present age, comparing it with its predecessors.