TEE EVANESCENCE OF FACTS i8i 



I took up tlie old portfolio. What is the matter with the facts ? They 

 seem just a little tarnished ; the mind is not tempted to gild them over 

 or rub them tip, the imagination refuses to endow them with those 

 winged words which carry newly quarried facts bright and shining to 

 the work table of the appreciative student, unhaunted by any shade of 

 historical perspective. Evidently the time to work a fact into the 

 masonry of science, "the solid ground of nature" upon which her 

 trusting and unsuspicious, non-historical, scientific children love to build, 

 is when it is fresh and when the mortar will cling to it. Coat it over 

 with the incrustations of criticism, the mould of age, and it must be 

 fresh hewed to the point of losing its identity — its susceptibility of 

 identification, I mean, — before it can be appreciated as a part of "the 

 solid ground of nature" — made solid of course by eyes, not really 

 myopic or hypermetropic when they have their errors of refraction prop- 

 erly corrected, made solid in a word by the unfailing, unerring use of 

 sense — a veritable fact, not an old fact, of course, but a new one. It is 

 true that an old fact is often not just the thing to trust to, but a new 

 one, and new ones are so easy to find if you have not wasted your time 

 with the old ones, lends that solidity of support which we love to 

 contemplate in the hierarchical press of science. It unfortunately has 

 come to look a little suspicious in the secular press, but a new fact, 

 really approved by the hierarchy of science, unsmirched by any touch of 

 the imagination and free of any suspicion of deductive birth, is a thing 

 of beauty if not a joy forever. The old facts, though they continue 

 to sing: 



Du hast uns gepflanzt; 

 Zu Tausenden kommen 



Wir, Vater, getanzt. 



are, I must confess, a pretty "poor run of shad." It is true it does 

 not seem just the way a fact should behave. Its vintage should improve 

 with age. It is undeniable, however, that in really choice circles of 

 science, the old facts are not looked on with favor. 



The imagery of Shakespeare, the flowers of eloquence in Demos- 

 thenes, need no burnishing, no drapery to hide their age, but the atoms 

 of Democritus and the spheres of Ptolemy need considerable correction, 

 and the cloud of insect facts which swarm up from my old yellow 

 sheets, if not simply disgusting, are at least uninspiring. Is it possible 

 then they lack something? A fact, it is true, should lack nothing. It 

 should stand alone unshamed in its nakedness — for is it not the truth? 

 Is not the truth divine? 



The concatenation of circumstance should have nothing to do with it. 

 The contemporaneous adornment it borrows from its environment must 

 be non-essential. I do not know how many facts can pass through this 

 crucible of criticism unscorched. All that I can say is that I have never 



