Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER The day after the letter Althaus arrived himself with a small valise and a courier’s bag, the latter containing in one compartment pipes and tobacco, and in another some books and a few scientific instruments, apparently carefully protected in leather cases. He spoke English slowly and with a strong German accent, but with perfect accuracy. I complimented him, and he answered simply that he had learned the language by reading English books which had been necessary to him, and had not been translated. I asked him if he knew Eussian in the same manner, and he said yes, it was necessary. Eussia at Moscow and St. Petersburg endowed science most liberally, and when a man who had in any way made his mark wanted to publish a book the Government would help him. More than that, he said, the Eussian Government spent large sums of money in promoting scientific research, and would always pay imperially for good work. I asked him about England, and he shook his head. ‘ You have had very few scientific men,’ he said, ‘ worthy of the name since the days of Henry Cavendish, who timed himself to death with his own repeater; and John Hunter, who boiled down the Irish giant. Your scientific men, if they practise medicine or surgery, think only of making guineas. Or if they devote themselves to chemistry or physiology, or any branch of study other than medicine or surgery, they like to read papers to ladies and guardsmen at champagne picnics, which they actually callscientific meetings, and to write trashy papers in the magazines in which the novels of your ephemeral novelists are spun out, or to get some job under Government with a pension attached to it, or an inferior order of knighthood. ’ It is the daily work of your scientific man in England not to toil in his laboratory as …
