It is not only that she has revealed to us infinite
space crowded with unnumbered worlds; infinite time peopled by unnumbered
existences; infinite organisms hitherto invisible but full of delicate and
iridescent loveliness; but also that she has been, as a great Archangel of
Mercy, devoting herself to the service of man. She has labored, her
votaries have labored, not to increase the power of despots or to add to
the magnificence of courts, but to extend human happiness, to economize
human effort, to extinguish human pain. Where of old, men toiled, half
blinded and half naked, in the mouth of the glowing furnace to mix the
white-hot iron, she now substitutes the mechanical action of the viewless
air. She has enlisted the sunbeam in her service to limn for us, with
absolute fidelity, the faces of the friends we love. She has shown the
poor miner how he may work in safety, even amid the explosive fire-damp of
the mine. She hits, by her anaesthetics, enabled the sufferer to be hushed
and unconscious while the delicate hand of some skilled operator cuts a
fragment from the nervous circle of the unquivering eye.
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