uage of the past into the phraseology of to-day, how near was his
forerunner of old to the conception which he thought, with pride, was all
his own, not only so true but so new. On the other hand, if the ideas of
the investigator of old, viewed in the light of modern knowledge, are
found to be so wide of the mark as to seem absurd, the smile which begins
to play upon the lips of the modern is checked by the thought, Will the
ideas which I am now putting forth, and which I think explain so clearly,
so fully, the problem in hand, seem to some worker in the far future as
wrong and as fantastic as do these of my forerunner to me? In either case
his personal pride is checked.

Further, there is written clearly on each page of the history of science,
in characters which cannot be overlooked, the lesson that no scientific
truth is born anew, coming by itself and of itself. Each new truth is
always the offspring of something which has gone before, becoming in turn
the parent of something coming after. In this aspect the man of science is
unlike, or seems to be unlike, the poet and the artist. The poet is born,
not made; he rises up, no man knowing his beginnings; when he goes away,
though men after him may sing his songs for centuries, he himself goes
away wholly, having taken with him his mantle, for this he can give to
none other. The man of science is not thus creative: he is created. His
work, however great it be, is not wholly his own: it is in part the
outcome of the work of men who have gone before. Again and again a
conception which has made a name great has come not so much by the man's
own effort as out of the fullness of time. Again and again we may read in
the words of some man of old the outlines of an idea which, in later days,
has shone forth as a great acknowledged truth. From the mouth of the man
of old the idea dropped barren, fruitless; the world was not ready for it,
and heeded it not; the concomitant and abutting truths which could give it
power to work were wanting. Coming back again in later days, the same idea
found the world awaiting it; things were in travail preparing for it, and
someone, seizing the right moment to put it forth again, leaped into fame.
It is not so much the men of science who make science, as some spirit,
which, born of the truths already won, drives the man of science onward
and uses him to win new truths in turn.

It is because each man of science is not his own master, but one of m