Transcribe Notice of the Ward cabinets...the University of Rochester (1863)

40 GEOLOGY AS A BRANCH OF EDUCATION.

thus promote the advancement of science erect a monument while they are living which will never let them die. The patriotic encouragement of art by the merchant princes of Florence, demonstrated the fact that there is a retributive reaction of the beautiful on the profitable. On the same principle some of the highest truths of abstract science have in time become a source of our daily bread. there are men who rail at Universities as too remote from practical life and living wants. 'What have eclipses and paralaxes to do with ordinary business? What good will it do to know that a monstrous lizard - dead eons ago - is sleeping in the bowels of the earth?' Much every way: cheaper coal and more gold, straighter roads and lighter wheelbarrows, richer farms and safer navigation, fewer needs and more supplies, better homes, better minds, and better hearts. Millions could not see the use of Bacon's philosophy; yet to-day it is in the artery of science, beating all over the world with profusions of knowledge. There is not a man in Christendom to whom it has not given better health and better sense. The airy and subtle principles which a thousand years ago were as high above men's heads as the top of the Himalaya, are now familiar truths. 'For truths are first cloud, then rain, and then harvests and food.' We say, therefore, elevate every department of science to the highest pitch possible, in so doing you elevate the standard of general education. Rochester has given us a model in thus fostering the fertile science of geology. The great Agassiz is doing a like work for Zoology. Ad when each of the natural sciences shall be similarly illustrated, we shall posses a finished cylcopaedia of nature; and the sheaves of the world will then make obedience to the harvest of the new."