Thus it is that the tangible utility of scientific results has made the public authorities understand that laboratory work should be encouraged and s… - Marcellin Berthelot

Gentlemen, formerly savants were looked upon as a little group of amateurs and leisured people, maintained at the expense of the labouring classes, and performing a work of luxury for the amusement and distraction of the favourites of fortune. This narrow and unjust view which took so little into account, our services and devotion to truth, this prejudice, ended by disappearing when the development of science showed that Nature's laws were applicable to practical industry, and their effect was to replace the old traditional receipts and empirics by profitable rules founded on observation and experience. To-day who would dare to look upon science as a sterile amusement in presence the general increase of national and private riches which resulted from it?

Science is the benefactor of humanity.

If each one of us adds something to the common weal in the domain of science, or art, or morality, the reason is because long series of generations have lived, worked, thought, and suffered before us. The science which you honour to-day has been created by the patient labours of our predecessors.