68 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



society to maintain and strengthen our professional loyalty, be- 

 cause upon that loyalty depends our success as a body, and as 

 a body we have a great work to do. Loyalty implies generous 

 co-operation, and secures that unity of feeling and action which 

 breeds success. Our influence is not yet large enough, and I hope 

 that it will be vastly increased by carrying out the scheme of 

 affiliation between ourselves and kindred societies. Unity is 

 power. 



It is believed by many outside of our profession that a scien- 

 tific career is narrowing in effect, and tends to obliterate human, 

 artistic, and religious interests. They look upon Darwin's loss of 

 sympathy with poetry as typical. The idea seems to me false. 

 The naturalists whom I know are as genuinely interested in their 

 friends and in art and in literature as any other group of liberal- 

 ly educated men. One of our foremost geologists is a learned mu- 

 sical enthusiast ; one of our botanists, a loving student of the best 

 European literature ; one of our anatomists, an earnest participant 

 in charitable work. I claim, in short, that the pursuit of pure sci- 

 ence broadens and deepens the character. Science is full of sub- 

 limity, of charm, of inspiration ; but the poet has not yet been 

 found who will express this aspect of science. We are like colo- 

 nists: our pioneers are continually advancing into new territo- 

 ries ; we must work incessantly to secure mere possession ; so it 

 is not yet quite time for the poet. 



Another characteristic of the naturalist is faith. He must 

 preserve his faith in the possibility and value of knowledge of 

 the truth. We often forget that this necessity exists. Although 

 we know not whither truth will lead us, whether to happiness or 

 to unhappiness, we nevertheless believe in it, trust in it, and 

 strive for it. Let us therefore have a broad-minded respect for 

 the faculty of faith, for the loss of it is a crushing disaster to a 

 naturalist. 



The loss of faith in the truth is rare ; its opposite, an exagger- 

 ated confidence in the possibilities of science, is not rare. I think 

 that we habitually measure science incorrectly, because we esti- 

 mate its magnitude by our individual capacity for knowledge, 

 and so come thoughtlessly to call that infinite which is merely 

 large. I hold the opposite conception, that the extent of possible 

 human knowledge is comparatively small so soon as we omit the 

 details. Huet, Bishop of Avranches, thought that the real knowl- 

 edge of his time,* aside from the details of history, etc., could be 

 put in ten folio volumes. He was probably not far from right. 

 All the knowledge of our time could be brought within the com- 

 pass of a moderate number of volumes. Nor does the future ap- 



* The latter part of the reign of Louis XIV. 



