52 



THE GUIDE TO NATURE. 



vet partly in earnest, I said, "You are 

 not to blame for not knowing, for the 

 simple fact that you don't do the going. 

 A man who never goes to church nor 

 reads a religious paper might get the 

 notion that God's Word is at a low ebb. 

 We see things out of our own eyes !" 



"If you are going to preach a nature 

 sermon to me — that I ought to be inter- 

 ested in bugs and things, I think I will 

 be going," he laughingly remarked. 

 "Good morning!" 



:Jc :£ % ^ 



Yes, I want to "preach a sermon" 

 along the line of that conversation, with 

 the subject, "The Fewness of Natural- 

 ists," which is another term for lovers of 

 God's Works." 



On the desk before me as I write lies 

 a book entitled "American Men of Sci- 

 ence." It contains a little more than 

 four thousand names of those "who have 

 carried on research work in the natural 

 and exact sciences." These are men of 

 ability, who for the most part have richly 

 endowed institutions of learning with all 

 the instruments of modern science. 

 These men form a large company of 

 workers. They have been aided by the 

 liberal gifts of philanthropists. They 

 have vied with one another in the publi- 

 cation of detailed and learned mono- 

 graphs, until the literature of anyone sub- 

 ject, or even a small part of a subject, 

 has become formidable to the uninitiated, 

 and burdensome even to the esoteric few. 



Thev form an army of respectable 

 size, and they are doing commendable 

 work. We are all proud to claim that 

 this is the age of science, and we congrat- 

 ulate ourselves on the great advances 

 made in the last quarter of a century. 

 Now, in face of this great efficiency, this 

 commendable work, this wonderful pro- 

 gress, these gigantic delvings into natur- 

 al science, what did my friend, the prin- 

 cipal, mean when he said that he knew 

 of only a half a dozen naturalists? He 

 unconsciously voiced in his jocose man- 

 ner a great present need ; namely, the 

 lack of assimilation in an age of won- 

 derful accumulation. He was uncon- 

 sciously confessing his ignorance of a 

 subject in which his remarks showed that 

 he felt no interest. 



To enter the closely related field of 

 God's Word, what a deplorable, one- 



sided state of affairs it would be if we 

 had about five thousand students of tech- 

 nical theology, or of the "higher criti- 

 cism," shut up in monastic institutions 

 and vying with one another in piling up 

 pamphlets to discuss the number of 

 angels that can dance on the point of a 

 needle, or in producing elaborate tomes 

 to argue about the difference between 

 homoousian and homoiousian, with only 

 a few scattered evangelists and Christian 

 preachers to make the world better 

 through the teaching and the influence 

 of God's Word. In the Middle Ages 

 theology was piled so high that it finally 

 toppled over ; now we have the world 

 growing better through the application 

 of Christian ethics, which is the basic 

 principle of what is, or should be, the 

 true theology. 



I do not mean for a moment to claim 

 that the present technical minutiae of 

 science are comparable with the verbal, 

 hair-splitting foolishness of theology in 

 the past. Xor would I claim that our 

 present technical science is miserly and 

 hoarding. All honor to pure science and 

 to its investigators. But I do claim that 

 the natural science of the present is ac- 

 cumulating; too much and too rapidly. 

 in proportion to dissemination. I would 

 not hold back science, I would advance 

 popularization. 



The bulk of scientific knowledge is now 

 enormous, and much of it is not only 

 buried within ponderous tomes written 

 in technical language, understood only 

 by those specially trained to read it, 

 but even the locality in which these vol- 

 umes are stored is a secret so far as the 

 amateur, or the ordinary but intelligent 

 reader is concerned. Even the strictly 

 scientific investigator is beginning to 

 complain. The late Professor Josepn 

 Leidy, one of this country's most illus- 

 trious observers and biologists, said that 

 he published the results of his study in the 

 Proceedings of only one scientific society, 

 because he wanted to spare future read- 

 ers and investigators all the time, labor 

 and annoyance that might be in his 

 power to save them. He said, in effect, 

 that the results of other men's work 

 were so extensive and so scattered that 

 to find the records, or even trying to 

 find them, was painfully exhausting 

 not only to the bodv but to the mind and 



