"If it had not been for quiet people, who sat still and studied the sections of the cone; if other 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 astronomy, 'our ships, our colonies, our seamen,' all that makes modern life, could not. have existed. Ages of quiet, sedentary, 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. It was the irritable activity, 'the wish to be doing something,' that prevented it. Most men inherited a nature too eager and too restless to find out things; and, even worse—with their idle clamor they disturbed the brooding hen, 1 they would not let those be quiet who wished to be so, and out of whose calm thought much good might have come forth. If we consider how much good science has done, and how much it is doing for mankind, and, if the over-activity of men is proved to be the cause why science came so late into the world, and is so small and scanty still, that will convince most people that our over-activity is a very great evil."