every kind.  If either could for a moment see the world with the vision of the other he would be amazed, but to do so he would need at least to be born again, and probably, as Samuel Butler remarked, of different parents.  No doubt the abler man of either type could learn with more or less effort or unreadiness the subject-matter and principles of the other’s business, but any one who has watched the habits of the two classes will perceive that for them in any real sense to exchange interests, or that either should adopt the scheme of proportion which the other assigns to the events of nature and of life, a metamorphosis well nigh miraculous must be presupposed.

The Bishop of London speaking lately on behalf of the National Mission said that nature helped him to believe in God, and as evidence for his belief referred to the fact that we are not “blown off” this earth as it rushes through space, declaring that this catastrophe had been averted because “Some one” had wrapped seventy miles of atmosphere round our planet[2].  Does any one think that the Bishop’s slip was in fact due to want of scientific teaching at Marlborough?  His chances of knowing about Sir Isaac Newton, etc., etc., have been as good as those of many familiar with the accepted version.  I would rather suppose that such sublunary problems had not interested him in the least, and that he no more cared how we happen to stick on the earth’s surface than St Paul cared how a grain of wheat or any other seed germinates beneath it, when he similarly was betrayed into an unfortunate illustration.

So too on the famous occasion—­always cited in these debates—­when a Home Secretary defended the Government for having permitted the importation of fats into Germany on the ground that the discovery that glycerine could be made from fat was a recent advance in chemistry, he was not showing the defects of a literary education so much as a want of interest in the problems of nature, and the subject-matter of science at large.  It is to be presumed indeed that neither fats, nor glycerine, nor the dependent problem how living bodies are related to the world they inhabit, had ever before seemed to him interesting.  Nor can we suppose they would, even if chemistry were substituted for Greek in Responsions.

The difficulty in obtaining full recognition for science lies deeper than this.  It is a part of public opinion or taste which may well survive changes in the educational system.  Blunders about science like those illustrated above are soon excused.  Few think much the worse of the perpetrators, whereas a corresponding obliviousness to language, history, literature, and indeed to learning other than their own which we of the scientific fraternity have agreed to condone in our members is incompatible with public life of a high order.  Both classes have their disabilities.  That of the scientific side is well expressed in an incident which befell the late Professor