I So TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



THE EVANESCENCE OF FACTS 



By De. JONATHAN WEIGHT 



DIEECTOE OF THE DEPARTMENT OF THE LABOEATORIES OF THE POST-GEADUATB MEDICAIi 



SCHOOL AND HOSPITAL 



IN looking over some old portfolios, I have lately dragged to light 

 elaborate notes which relate and discuss various facts set forth by 

 the laboratories of this and other lands. Yellow with age, but vivid 

 with the interest and bursting with the importance with which the 

 scientific environment of the day invested them for me, they have set 

 me musing on the vanity of human interests, especially the vanity of 

 scientific interests. I remember the sonorous periods which reverberate 

 from university platforms, the mottoes flaunted on the title page of many 

 a scientific journal, " To the solid ground of nature trusts the mind 

 which builds for aye." The pride, the pomp and circumstance of war 

 burn in a feeble flame when compared with the assurance which fills 

 the bosom and exudes at the lips of the man of science when he con- 

 templates the firmness of the pedestal upon which he stands, the rock of 

 ages, the steel concrete foundation against which dash in vain the 

 skepticism of the scoffer and the voluble waves of theory and ratio- 

 cination. 



For is not this substructure the product of the unerring interpreta- 

 tion of vision, hearing, of smell and taste and feeling ? Vision aided by 

 spherical glasses, aberrations of light and obscurity of outline corrected 

 by the proper means, sound amplified by vibrating plates and confined 

 by hollow conduits, smell — well, there is some doubt about smell — it 

 is a recessive — however, the solidity of the ground of nature as betrayed 

 by the senses, that is, most of them, is such a contrast to the airy super- 

 structure built by deductive reasoning and by the imagination, unrefined 

 by submission to the crucial test of experiment, that it is not worth 

 while to dwell on the fallaciousness of the senses. 



However, to go back to my old notes, yellow with age, musty with 

 the dust of the intervening years, like the moths and insects from 

 Faust's old coat when Mephistopheles shook them out, they may sing : 



Willkommen ! Willkommen ! 



Du alter Patron, 

 Wir sehweben und summen 



Und kennen dicli schon. 



But I recognize them only as a particularly uninteresting and lousy lot 

 of lowly organisms. I am not at all tempted to utilize them as founda- 

 tion stones for the imposing edifice I was secretly longing to build when 



