188 RAYMOND C. OSBURN Vol. XXII, No. 7 



with the atmosphere, " etc., while every scientific man has known 

 for the past 25 years that it can be distributed only through 

 the bite of an Anopheles mosquito. 



There is scarcely a newspaper that does not occasionally 

 carry an advertisement of an astrologer, a crystal gazer, a 

 clairvoyant, or other similar kind of fakir, while the number 

 of people who still consult the medical almanac for the signs 

 of the zodiac and the changes of the moon is very large, even 

 in the most enlightened countries. The traditional super- 

 stitions of the primitive civilization of our forefathers still 

 hold sway in the minds of multitudes in spite of the advance- 

 ment of the few. 



This is easily understood in the uneducated and in that 

 portion of the public whose intelligence rating is much below 

 the average, for such people either have no capacity for much 

 understanding, or no knowledge on which to base anything but 

 an unscientific belief — and when you come to that kind of 

 belief it is as easy to believe one thing as another, especially 

 if you are not particular as to the basis for it. There is a line 

 in an old hymn which runs to the efiPect that "blind unbelief 

 is sure to err. " It would have been equally true had it stated 

 that blind belief is sure to err. It is the blindness in either 

 case that results in the error. "Belief, in the scientific sense of 

 the word," says Huxley, "is a serious matter, and needs strong 

 foundations." 



When we come to the educated portion of the public we 

 have some right to expect more discrimination and less general 

 credulity. We have a right to expect that they will refrain 

 from attempts to discredit the work of capable scientists 

 on the basis that it controverts some already established 

 belief. An educated man should at least be able to draw the 

 line between what he knows and what he doesn't know and 

 not attempt to pass judgment on matters outside of his field 

 of training. The educated man without scientific training 

 has no more basis for forming a proper judgment of the Law 

 of Evolution than of the Einstein Theory of Relativity. 



I have said that no scientist doubts the broad fact of evolution 

 in the organic and inorganic worlds, but it is equally true 

 that in the minds of many of the unscientific, there still remains 

 not only a doubt, but a positive conviction that evolution is 

 merely a vague guess of the scientist and that it is not necessary 



