Give me just one tooth of an elephant, dredged up off Scarborough, and if I don't make those men delighted, then I may leave the Royal Society." "But, my good Bashaw," said Blair, "if you blindfold one of the skippers, and tell him the soundings from time to time, he'll take you from point to point, and pick up his marks just as surely as you could touch your bedroom-door in the dark." "Exactly.

That's empirical knowledge; but when you explain _causes_, you give a man a new pleasure.

It _clinches_ his knowledge.

Then, again, supposing I were to tell those men something accurate about the movement of the stars?
Don't you think that would be interesting?
If I could not make it like a romance, then all the years I spent in learning were thrown away." "Could you get them to care for anything of the kind?
Do you know that a seaman is the most absolutely conservative of the human race ?" "We must begin.

You give the men light, and I'll be bound that some of us will make them like sweetness.