surely it is time some one
started a movement for suppressing illiterate Ph.D.'s.

[Sidenote: The Psalmist and Dr. Johnson]

Of this class, one feels sure, are the scientific heroes of the
sensational articles in the monthly magazines of the baser sort, of
which we picked up a number in the Kantishna on our way to the mountain.
Here, in a picture that seems to have obtruded itself bodily into a page
of letter-press, or else to have suffered the accidental irruption of a
page of letter-press all around it, you shall see a grave scientist
looking anxiously down a very large microscope, and shall read that he
has transferred a kidney from a cat to a dog, and therefore we can no
longer believe in the immortality of the soul; or else that he has
succeeded in artificially fertilizing the ova of a starfish--or was it a
jellyfish?--and therefore there is no God; not just in so many bald
words, of course, but in unmistakable import. Or it may be--so commonly
does the crassest credulity go hand in hand with the blankest
scepticism--he has discovered the germ of old age and is hot upon the
track of another germ that shall destroy it, so that we may all live
virtually as long as we like; which, of course, disposes once for all of
a world to come. The Psalmist was not always complaisant or even
temperate in his language, but he lived a long time ago and must be
pardoned; his curt summary stands: "Dixit insipiens!" But the writer
vows that if he were addicted to the pursuit of any branch of physical
knowledge he would insist upon being called by the name of that branch.
He would be a physiologist or a biologist or an anatomist or even a
herpetologist, but none should call him "scientist." As Doll Tearsheet
says in the second part of "King Henry IV": "These villains will make
the word as odious as the word 'occupy'; which was an excellent good
word before it was ill-sorted." If Doctor Johnson were compiling an
English dictionary to-day he would define "scientist" something thus: "A
cant name for an experimenter in some department of physical knowledge,
commonly furnished with arrogance and dogmatism, but devoid of real
learning."

Here is no gibe at the physical sciences. To sneer at them were just as
foolish as to sneer at religion. What we could do on this expedition in
a "scientific" way we did laboriously and zealously. We would never have
thought of attempting the ascent of the mountain without bringing back
whatever little ad