The Voice of Science in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Representative Prose and Verse
Science
The Voice of Science in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Representative Prose and Verse
English literature -- 19th century; Literature, Modern; Science; Science in literature
Where shall we begin or end the list of those feats of liberty and wit,
each of which feats made an epoch of history? Thus, the effect of a framed
or stone house is immense on the tranquillity, power, and refinement of
the builder. A man in a cave or in a camp, a nomad, will die with no more
estate than the wolf or the horse leaves. But so simple a labor as a house
being achieved, his chief enemies are kept at bay. He is safe from the
teeth of wild animals, from frost, sunstroke, and weather; and fine
faculties begin to yield their fine harvest. Invention and art are born,
manners and social beauty and delight. 'Tis wonderful how soon a piano
gets into a log-hut on the frontier. You would think they found it under
a pine-stump. With it comes a Latin Grammar--and one of those tow-head
boys has written a hymn on Sunday. Now let colleges, now let senates, take
heed! for here is one who, opening these fine tastes on the basis of the
pioneer's iron constitution, will gather all their laurels in his strong
hands.
When the Indian trail gets widened, graded, and bridged to a good road,
there is a benefactor, there is a missionary, a pacificator, a
wealth-bringer, a maker of markets, a vent for industry. Another step in
civility is the change from war, hunting, and pasturage to agriculture.
Our Scandinavian forefathers have left us a significant legend to convey
their sense of the importance of this step. "There was once a giantess who
had a daughter, and the child saw a husbandman ploughing in the field.
Then she ran and picked him up with her finger and thumb, and put him and
his plough and his oxen into her apron, and carried them to her mother,
and said, 'Mother, what sort of a beetle is this that I found wriggling in
the sand?' But the mother said, 'Put it away, my child; we must begone out
of this land, for these people will dwell in it.'" Another success is the
post-office, with its educating energy augmented by cheapness and guarded
by a certain religious sentiment in mankind; so that the power of a wafer
or a drop of wax or gluten to guard a letter, as it flies over sea, over
land, and comes to its address as if a battalion of artillery brought it,
I look upon as a fine metre of civilization.
The division of labor, the multiplication of the arts of peace, which is
nothing but a large allowance to each man to choose his work according to
his faculty,--to live by his better hand,--fills the State with useful and
happy laborers; and they, creating demand by the very temptation of their
productions, are rapidly and surely rewarded by good sale: and what a
police and ten commandments their work thus becomes! So true is Dr.
Johnson's remark that "men are seldom more innocently employed than when
they are making money."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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