have given much, or rather my father would have given much, if I could have got hold of such scientific books as are to be found now in any first-class elementary school.  And if more expensive books are needed; if a microscope or apparatus is needed; can you not get them by the co-operative method, which has worked so well in other matters?  Can you not form yourselves into a Natural Science club, for buying such things and lending them round among your members; and for discussion also, the reading of scientific papers of your own writing, the comparing of your observations, general mutual help and mutual instructions?  Such societies are becoming numerous now, and gladly should I see one in every town.  For in science, as in most matters, “As iron sharpeneth iron, so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend.”

And Brotherhood: well, if you want that; if you want to mix with men, and men, too, eminently worth mixing with, on the simple ground that “a man’s a man for a’ that;” if you want to become the acquaintances, and—if you prove worthy—the friends, of men who will be glad to teach you all they know, and equally glad to learn from you anything you can teach them, asking no questions about you, save, first—Is he an honest student of Nature for her own sake?  And next—Is he a man who will not quarrel, or otherwise behave in an unbrotherly fashion to his fellow-students?—If you want a ground of brotherhood with men, not merely in these islands, but in America, on the Continent—in a word, all over the world—such as rank, wealth, fashion, or other artificial arrangements of the world cannot give and cannot take away; if you want to feel yourself as good as any man in theory, because you are as good as any man in practice, except those who are better than you in the same line, which is open to any and every man; if you wish to have the inspiring and ennobling feeling of being a brother in a great freemasonry which owns no difference of rank, of creed, or of nationality—the only freemasonry, the only International League which is likely to make mankind (as we all hope they will be some day) one—then become men of science.  Join the freemasonry in which Hugh Miller, the poor Cromarty stonemason, in which Michael Faraday, the poor bookbinder’s boy, became the companions and friends of the noblest and most learned on earth, looked up to by them not as equals merely but as teachers and guides, because philosophers and discoverers.

Do you wish to be great?  Then be great with true greatness; which is,—knowing the facts of nature, and being able to use them.  Do you wish to be strong?  Then be strong with true strength; which is, knowing the facts of nature, and being able to use them.  Do you wish to be wise?  Then be wise with true wisdom; which is, knowing the facts of nature, and being able to use them.  Do you wish to be free?  Then be free with true freedom; which is again, knowing the facts of nature, and being able to use them.

I dare say some of my readers, especially the younger ones, will demur to that last speech of mine.  Well, I hope they will not be angry with me for saying it.  I, at least, shall certainly not he angry with them.  For when I was young I was very much of what I suspect is their opinion.  I used to think one could get perfect freedom, and social reform, and all that I wanted, by altering the arrangements of society and legislation; by constitutions, and Acts of Parliament; by putting society into some sort of freedom-mill, and grinding it all down, and regenerating it so.  And that something can be done by improved arrangements, something can be done by Acts of Parliament, I hold still, as every rational man must hold.

But as I grew older, I began to see that if things were to be got right, the freedom-mill would do very little towards grinding them right, however well and amazingly it was made.  I began to see that what sort of flour came out at one end of the mill, depended mainly on what sort of grain you had put in at the other; and I began to see that the problem was to get good grain, and then good flour would be turned out, even by a very clumsy old-fashioned sort of mill.  And what do I mean by good grain?  Good men, honest men, accurate men, righteous men, patient men, self-restraining men, fair men, modest men.  Men who are aware of their own vast ignorance compared with the vast amount that there is to be learned in such a universe as this.  Men who are accustomed to look at both sides of a question; who, instead of making up their minds in haste like bigots and fanatics, wait like wise men, for more facts, and more thought about the facts.  In one word, men who had acquired just the habit of mind which the study of Natural Science can give, and must give; for without it there is no use studying Natural Science; and the man who has not got that habit of mind, if he meddles with science, will merely become a quack and a charlatan, only fit to get his bread as a spirit-rapper, or an inventor of infallible pills.

And when I saw that, I said to myself—I will train myself, by Natural Science, to the truly rational, and therefore truly able and useful, habit of mind; and more, I will, for it is my duty as an Englishman, train every Englishman over whom I can get influence in the same scientific habit of mind, that I may, if possible, make him, too, a rational and an able man.

And, therefore, knowing that most of you, my readers—probably all of you, as you ought and must if you are Britons, think much of social and political questions—-therefore, I say, I entreat you to cultivate the scientific spirit by which alone you can judge justly of those questions.  I ask you to learn how to “conquer nature by obeying her,” as the great Lord Bacon said two hundred and fifty years ago.  For so only will you in your theories and your movements, draw “bills which nature will honour”—to use Mr. Carlyle’s famous parable—because they are according to her unchanging laws, and not have them returned on your hands, as too many theorists’ are, with “no effects” written across their backs.

Take my advice for yourselves, dear readers, and for your children after you; for, believe me, I am showing you the way to true and useful, and, therefore, to just and deserved power.  I am showing you the way to become members of what I trust will be—what I am certain ought to be—the aristocracy of the future.

I say it deliberately, as a student of society and of history.  Power will pass more and more, if all goes healthily and well, into the hands of scientific men; into the hands of those who have made due use of that great heirloom which the philosophers of the seventeenth century left for the use of future generations, and specially of the Teutonic race.

For the rest, events seem but too likely to repeat themselves again and again all over the world, in the same hopeless circle.  Aristocracies of mere birth decay and die, and give place to aristocracies of mere wealth; and they again to “aristocracies of genius,” which are really aristocracies of the noisiest, of mere scribblers and spouters, such as France is writhing under at this moment.  And when these last have blown off their steam, with mighty roar, but without moving the engine a single yard, then they are but too likely to give place to the worst of all aristocracies, the aristocracy of mere “order,” which means organised brute force and military despotism.  And, after that, what can come, save anarchy, and decay, and social death?

What else?—unless there be left in the nation, in the society, as the salt of the land, to keep it all from rotting, a sufficient number of wise men to form a true working aristocracy, an aristocracy of sound and rational science?  If they be strong enough (and they are growing stronger day by day over the civilised world), on them will the future of that world mainly depend.  They will rule, and they will act—cautiously we may hope, and modestly and charitably, because in