! It was not always so; it was
not so with the really great men who have advanced our knowledge of
nature. But of late years hordes of small men have given themselves up
to the study of the physical sciences without any study preliminary. It
would almost seem nowadays that whoever can sit in the seat of the
scornful may sit in the seat of learning.

[Sidenote: The Scientists]

A good many years ago, on an occasion already referred to, the writer
roamed through the depths of the Grand Canyon with a chance acquaintance
who described himself as "Herpetologist to the Academy of Sciences" in
some Western or Mid-Western State, and as this gentleman found the
curious little reptiles he was in search of under a root or in a cranny
of rock he repeated their many-syllabled names. Curious to know what
these names literally meant and whence derived, the writer made inquiry,
sometimes hazarding a conjectural etymology. To his astonishment and
dismay he found this "scientist," whom he had looked up to, entirely
ignorant of the meaning of the terms he employed. They were just
arbitrary terms to him. The little hopping and crawling creatures might
as well have been numbered, or called x, y, z, for any significance
their formidable nomenclature held for him. Yet this man had been keenly
sarcastic about the Noachian deluge and had jeered from the height of
his superiority at hoary records which he knew only at second-hand
reference, and had laid it down that if the human race became extinct
the birds would stand the best chance of "evolving a primate"! Since
that time other "scientists" have been encountered, with no better
equipment, with no history, no poetry, no philosophy in any broad sense,
men with no letters--illiterate, strictly speaking--yet with all the
dogmatism in the world. Can any one be more dogmatic than your modern
scientist? The reproach has passed altogether to him from the
theologian.

The thing grows, and its menace and scandal grow with it. Since coming
"outside" the writer has encountered a professor at a college, a Ph.D.
of a great university, who confessed that he had never heard of certain
immortal characters of Dickens whose names are household words. We shall
have to open Night-Schools for Scientists, where men who have been
deprived of all early advantages may learn the rudiments of English
literature. One wishes that Dickens himself might have dealt with their
pretensions, but they are since his day. And