650 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



" The radioactive substances evolve a perennial supply of energy 

 from year to year without stimulus and without exhaustion." 



This is simply not true, as is fully shown later in the book — 

 why then start with so misleading a statement ? What too is a 

 perennial supply ? Gardening is so much in vogue in these 

 days that most people know what perennials are — plants which 

 the dealers say will live several years but which as often die 

 during the first. This doubtless is not the connotation Prof. 

 Soddy would select ; the accepted meaning, perpetual, is 

 incorrect. The word is again misused in Chap. III. A similar 

 confusing statement on p. 32 might also be modified with advan- 

 tage : it is undesirable in a scientific work to sacrifice accuracy 

 to rhetoric, rather is it necessary to follow the rigid Euclidian 

 method of argument throughout. 



It is evident that in 1908 Prof. Soddy was irritated by the 

 criticisms which were passed when the full meaning of the new 

 discoveries was not yet apparent and the evidence could not 

 easily be appreciated — otherwise he would not have written (p. 5): 

 " Natural conservatism and dislike of innovation appear in the 

 ranks of science more strongly than most people are aware. 

 Indeed science is no exception." Either this statement should 

 disappear from the next edition of the book or the position 

 should be correctly defined. The assertion that there is dislike 

 of innovation in the ranks of science is unjustifiable : we are 

 ever on the look-out for new things and prepared to welcome 

 the addition of an ascertained truth to the existing body of 

 knowledge ; the complaint commonly made of a fresh number of 

 a journal is that there is nothing new in it of interest. And if 

 conservatism be natural, as they are human beings, scientific 

 workers, like most other people, are by nature necessarily 

 conservative. If men generally were not conservative, society 

 would have little stability. It is the first duty, moreover, of the 

 scientific worker to be critical and to deny belief until satisfactory 

 proof be given that he is justified in believing. It is just because 

 so few are critical and logical that there are so few, even in the 

 ranks of science, who deserve to be termed scientific — it is for 

 this reason also that science is making so little progress among 

 the people at large and that we can scarcely hope that it ever will 

 make much progress. In the ranks of Science, as in those of an 

 army, the majority are privates disciplined to do this or that 

 work and to accept instructions ; only the few are fit to exercise 





