134 THE ALUMNI JOURNAL 



mosphere filled with the snapping sparks of rapidly following 

 emotional outbursts. The patient examination of evidence is not 

 easy at a time when trial by newspaper elbows to one side the 

 slower process of trial by jury. The careful study of all that is 

 involved in a proposal for some new sort of action in morals, in 

 politics, or in society, is at a disadvantage when public attention 

 is dragged quickly from one point of the emotional compass to an- 

 other, and when masses of men, intent only on what they wish to 

 get away from, have no sort of care for what they are going to- 

 ward. Just now gossip displaces conversation ; vice and loathsome 

 disease are extolled as worthy of discussion in the drawing-room 

 and of presentation on the stage ; absorption in current topics 

 (which tomorrow may be neither current nor topics) leaves no 

 place for the genuine study of that history and that literature 

 which have withstood Horace's fuga temporum. Every ruling 

 tendency is to make life a flat-land, an affair of two dimensions, 

 with no depth, no background, no permanent roots. 



For all this there is no support to be found in the study of 

 science, of history, of literature, or of philosophy; least of all, in the 

 lessons taught by the majestic doctrine of evolution. Each and all 

 of these insists unendingly on thoroughness and on standards of 

 excellence. There can be no doubt, however, that we moderns 

 have lost much of the old respect for thoroughness. We seem to 

 think that superficial brilliancy counts for more. 



It is of vital importance for those who are just now forming their 

 habits of mind and of conduct, and who are making for themselves 

 a view of the world, to ponder all this and to realize what it means. 

 He would be a poor scientist indeed who should describe the ocean 

 in terms of its superficial currents, its calms, its storms and its 

 tempests only. The dark, silent depths, with their rich remains of 

 ages that are passed and with forms of life all their own, exerting 

 as they ao a profound influence on the habitable globe, would 

 count for nothing in such a judgment. Or he would likewise be a 

 poor scientist who should describe the earth's envelope in terms of 

 the air which man breathes at or near the surface of the earth. The 

 stupendous problems of physics, of chemistry, of mechanics, of 

 astronomy, that grow out of and are illuminated by the character- 

 istics of the upper atmosphere and of the ether, would go unnoted. 

 In similar fashion the estimation of man's individual and social 



