A Science Gone Mad?

"It is the just complaint of serious men in this age of ours, which is so much more refined in letters and manners than the coarse ages of the past, that men are to be found who so heartily detest all fine literature that they would have only those arts and sciences endowed and accepted in our centers of learning which contribute to gainful employment, while they would have all others perpetually banished as vain and useless. Among the first of the latter they number the knowledge of natural things, and its most noble part, which we call Lithology; they pursue it with an especially censorious rod, and condemn it to rejection from the world of erudition as one of the wanton futilities of intellectual idlers. To what purpose, they ask, do we stare fixedly with eye and mind at small stones and figured rocks, at little images of animals or plants, the rubbish of mountain and stream, found by chance amid the muck and sand of land and sea? To what purpose do we, at the cost of much gold and labor, examine these findings, describe them in vast tomes, commit them to engravings and circulate them about the world, and will fill thick volumes with useless arguments about them? What a waste of time and of the labors of gifted men to dissipate their talents by ensnaring them in this sort of game and vain sport! Does this not amount to neglecting the cares of the realm to catch flies; to sending a mighty army out to collect shells, and then to reward their glorious expedition by building them a triumphal arch or shrine of shells, wherein the high priest is the physician, the idols are stone images of little beasts, the incense and victims are the efforts, the genius, and the expenses of learned men gone mad? To hunt for prodigious pearls, to gather the precious coral from the depths of the sea, to wrest gems and metals and marble from the bowels of mountains, or to transport these things from foreign lands, through countless storms and perils, these are labors worthy of the expenses of princes, of the care and diligence of great minds. Such things fill the treasury, increase the wealth of private citizens, and contribute to the commonweal. The fruits of such labor are never matters of regret. Thus in defiance of all the rules and precepts of sane philosophy do those souls, bent to the ground and tormented by the pseudosacred and insatiable hunger for gold, esteem the dignity and worth of the sublime sciences in terms of usefulness and gain."

- Dr. Johann Bartholomew Adam Beringer (Lithographiae Wirceburgensis, as translated in The Lying Stones of Dr. Johann Bartholomew Adam Beringer)