And not only may you be able to help your neighbours to find out what will give them health and wealth: but you may, if you can only get them to listen to you, save them from many a foolish experiment, which ends in losing money just for want of science.

I have heard of a man who, for want of science, was going to throw away great sums (I believe he, luckily for him, never could raise the money) in boring for coal in our Bagshot sands at home.

The man thought that because there was coal under the heather moors in the North, there must needs be coal here likewise, when a geologist could have told him the contrary.

There was another man at Hennequin's Lodge, near the Wellington College, who thought he would make the poor sands fertile by manuring them with whale oil, of all things in the world.

So he not only lost all the cost of his whale oil, but made the land utterly barren, as it is unto this day; and all for want of science.
And I knew a manufacturer, too, who went to bore an Artesian well for water, and hired a regular well-borer to do it.