56 NATIONAL TRENDS IN BIOLOGY 



ferent from what their textbooks imply. If scientists will 

 cast aside what they really believe and are supposed to 

 hold dear, merely to sell a few extra copies of their pub- 

 lications, why should one expect nonscientific minds to 

 believe that science leads to truth? 



Peabody has recently said: 



"The popular conception of a scientist as a man who 

 works in a laboratory and who uses instruments of pre- 

 cision is as inaccurate as it is superficial, for a scientist is 

 known not by his technical processes, but by his intellec- 

 tual processes; and the essence of the scientific method 

 of thought is that it proceeds in an orderly manner to- 

 ward the establishment of a truth."^ 



Yet how far short of that ideal even a most eminent 

 man, in such a supposedly absolute science as mathe- 

 matics, may fall ! Consider the case of M. Michel Chas- 

 les,^ one of the leading geometricians of his time. Be- 

 tween the years of 1861 and 1870, he bought more than 

 27,000 manuscripts forged by a man with meager educa- 

 tion, who must have worked many hours daily for long 

 years to complete so many. These manuscripts contained 

 hundreds of letters from Pascal, twenty-seven from 

 Shakespeare, hundreds from Rabelais, many from New- 

 ton, Louis XIV, from the Cid, and from Galileo. There 

 were letters from Sappho, Virgil, Caesar, St. Luke, Plato, 

 Pliny, Alexander the Great, and Pompey. There was 

 even a letter from Cleopatra to Caesar, a note from Laza- 

 rus to Peter and a pleasant little missive from Mary 

 Magdalen to the King of the Burgundians. 



