LIVERMORE. — DEVELOPMENT OF THE ARTS AND SCIENCES. 35 



more intelligible and interesting. Meander through the country by all 

 means, but look at it from a balloon with a field glass on every available 

 opportunity. Keep your map with you, and years hence you will recall 

 what you have seen. 



Scientific books should be supplied with classified tables of contents, 

 so complete as to recall every idea worth remembering. The books 

 might be so written as to be intelligible when opened in the middle. 

 Where algebraic or other signs are used, they should also be thoroughly 

 indexed. Models, of course, are far better than pictures. It is better 

 to make use of three dimensions whenever possible rather than two, and 

 movable models would give us four dimensions to work with. Neither 

 charts nor models fatigue the mind any more than sentences, but in the 

 same time they teach moie and make more lasting impressions. 



The systematic reduction of knowledge opens the way to systematic 

 co-operation. The centrifugal tendencies of the age have been useful in 

 scattering explorers over a wide field, but the waste of labor has been 

 incalculable, — one after another has trodden the same path, when each 

 should have begun his work where the other had ended. If facts and 

 laws and principles are properly tabulated as soon as they are discovered, 

 it will not be necessary for each man to set up an independent hypothesis, 

 but the work of investigation can be properly distributed. 



The methods employed in military operations for deploying scouts to 

 explore the field of operations could be used to good advantage in all the 

 sciences. 



Napoleon and his staff were on the banks of the Red Sea at low 

 water at the spot where the children of Israel were said to have crossed. 

 After sunset they lost their path, and as they were wandering among the 

 sands the rapidly returning tide surrounded them, and they would have 

 met with the fate of Pharaoh, but Napoleon collected his escort around 

 him in several concentric circles, each horseman facing outward. He 

 theu ordered them to advance, each in the direction he was facins;. 

 When the horse of the leader of one of these files lost his foothold and 

 began to swim, the file drew back and followed in the direction of another 

 file which had not yet lost its firm ground. The files thrown out in 

 every direction were in this way successively withdrawn, till all were fol- 

 lowing in the direction of the one which had a stable footiuw Thus the 

 escape was effected, and by a similar method of co-operation the process 

 of induction could be facilitated in all sciences. 



In applying these principles to the separate sciences. Mathematics, 

 Physics, and Engineering may be considered together. 



