NOTES AND COMMENT 



A large part of the general reading public think of science either as a 

 congeries of marvelous and important medical discoveries and electrical 

 inventions or else as the accumulating of very abstruse and useless facts 

 by men of great erudition and absent-mindedness. The daily and 

 weekly press and the monthly magazines are largely responsible for this 

 attitude, and they now cater to it in a manner which is sometimes amus- 

 ing to the man of science, sometimes calculated to wear the tender fabric 

 of his good nature to the point of rupture. 



A recent editorial article in The Philadelphia Press on Davenport's 

 Heredity in Relation to Eugenics is a piece of childish drivel, carrying 

 no intimation of the value of Davenport's work, making no criticism of 

 it, and merely singling out one of two of its statements in a lame effort 

 to say something amusing about them. A newspaper worthy of public 

 respect would use its editorial columns to stimulate its readers to think, 

 and not to provoke them to smile at a subject in which it might well wish 

 to interest them. A recent issue of as dignified a weekly as The Nation 

 gives two of the three columns devoted to science to a review of J. H. 

 Robinson's Principles and Practice of Poultry Keeping. There is no 

 gainsaying the possibility of putting much scientific method into poultry 

 culture and of extracting many scientific facts from it. Can it be, though 

 that The Nation beholds the scientific activities of the world at such a 

 low ebb that it must go this far afield to secure matter for review? The 

 Nation has, perhaps, a larger clientele of thinking readers than any other 

 American publication, but they are chiefly people to whom the best 

 fruits of scientific work and thought are not well known. The few scien- 

 tific books which it has space to review should, for this very reason, be 

 extremely well chosen. Even Harper's Magazine, which presents so 

 many excellent articles of scientific character, assumes that the weight 

 of the name and professional connections of a writer will outbalance 

 bootless sentimentality and serious misstatement of fact. In the March 

 issue Dr. Edward A. Ayers, writing on The Seventh Sense in Man and 

 Animals, says: "No living product of the vegetable kingdom finds use 

 for equilibrial aids, for they are one with Mother Earth, and leave all 

 questions of gravity, motion and balancing to her. Nor in the animal 



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