If it had
not been for quiet people, who sat still and studied the sections of
the cone, if other quiet people had not sat still and studied the
theory of infinitesimals, or other quiet people had not sat still
and worked out the doctrine of chances, the most 'dreamy moonshine,'
as the purely practical mind would consider, of all human pursuits;
if 'idle star-gazers' had not watched long and carefully the motions
of the heavenly bodies--our modern astronomy would have been
impossible, and without our astronomy 'our ships, our colonies, our
seamen,' all which makes modern life modern life could not have
existed. Ages of sedentary, quiet, thinking people were required
before that noisy existence began, and without those pale
preliminary students it never could have been brought into being.
And nine-tenths of modern science is in this respect the same: it is
the produce of men whom their contemporaries thought dreamers--who
were laughed at for caring for what did not concern them--who, as
the proverb went, 'walked into a well from looking at the stars'--
who were believed to be useless, if any one could be such. And the
conclusion is plain that if there had been more such people, if the
world had not laughed at those there were, if rather it had
encouraged them there would have been a great accumulation of proved
science ages before there was.
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