matics. The company proceeded to fall upon America as being entirely 

 materialistic and given over to dollar chasing. Fine stood it as long as 

 he could and turned on the Germans with a counterattack. He said 

 that Germany's great industrial development would inevitably lead 

 to an intellectual decline and bring about a period of money worship, 

 when the best brains of the country would forsake the academic career 

 in favour of the practical Hfe. This forecast was received with derision 

 as being ludicrously impossible. Years afterward, Klein wrote to Fine, 

 asking if he remembered the conversation in the mathematical Seminar 

 of such a date and ending: "Everything that you prophesied then has 

 come to pass; you were absolutely right in every particular." 



My life in England and association with the scientific leaders there 

 had prepared me to form a cool and objective estimate of the Germans 

 and their claims to leadership in all departments of science. Had I gone 

 directly from home to Germany, my conclusions would probably have 

 been different. From the quantitative standpoint, Germany stood at 

 the head; no other country had so large a number of competent inves- 

 tigators in all departments of science, or so many brilliant names in the 

 roll of honour. Nevertheless, the Darwins, the Pasteurs, were English 

 or French, not German. Of course, Einstein is an extraordinary excep- 

 tion, but his work v/as still to come, at the time of which I am writing. 

 Even in lines in which the Germans have made themselves preeminent, 

 such as microscopic petrology, the pathfinder was Sorby, an Eng- 

 lishman. 



German science, too, was exclusively academic; the independent 

 investigator, who held no position and was responsible to nobody, such 

 men as Darwin, in short, were entirely absent and, therefore, there 

 was a rigidity and discipline in German science which were peculiar 

 to the country, I did not have to wait till 1914 to learn that German 

 science was theory-ridden, and that, when an investigator adopted a 

 theory, he thereby blinded himself to every fact that did not tell in its 

 favour. Gegenbaur was a very independent and truth-loving investi- 

 gator, who never let a theory run away with him; for most of his Ger- 

 man colleagues he cherished an unconcealed contempt, as he made 

 very plain to me in our frequent, almost daily, discussions in the labora- 

 tory. Some of them he despised so heartily, that he could not mention 

 their names without some expression of annoyance. 



At the time of my first long visit, Germany was still in the heroic 

 period, which was nearly coextensive with the reign of the old Emperor, 

 William I. The great historic figures, Bismarck, Moltke, Roon, were 



C 127 ] 



