For if the only answer be: "None
at all," a man has a right to rejoin: "Then let me take up some
pursuit which will train and refresh my mind as much as this one,
and yet be of pecuniary benefit to me some day." If you can find
such a study, by all means follow it: but I say that this study too
may be of great practical benefit in after life. How much money
have I, young as I am, seen wasted for want of a little knowledge of
botany, geology, or chemistry. How many a clever man becomes the
dupe of empirics for want of a little science. How many a mine is
sought for where no mine could be; or crop attempted to be grown,
where no such crop could grow. How many a hidden treasure, on the
other hand, do men walk over unheeding. How many a new material,
how many an improved process in manufacture is possible, yet is
passed over, for want of a little science. And for the man who
emigrates, and comes in contact with rude nature teeming with
unsuspected wealth, of what incalculable advantage to have if it be
but the rudiments of those sciences, which will tell him the
properties, and therefore the value, of the plants, the animals, the
minerals, the climates with which he meets? True--home-learnt
natural history will not altogether teach him about these things,
because most of them must needs be new: but it will teach him to
compare and classify them as he finds them, and so by analogy with
things already known to him, to discover their intrinsic worth.
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