430 PHYSIOLOGICAl. REGULATIONS 



are justly proud does allow of voluntary superplanning when a 

 common design is widely recognized to be possible. 



It is said of certain work that it is ''mere" description. It is 

 implied that description is less worthy of time and attention than 

 material interwoven with hypotheses of some other sort. It is 

 even said that description is ''undigested," as though without 

 hypothesis of singular nexus there is no thought or work. Unique 

 nexuses between two variables A and B are rarely found; to 

 imagine they are there stimulates interest ; yet that sort of interest 

 has usually, I gather, no value to the next generation of scientists. 

 In so far as such interest pervades the materials of physiology, 

 it is an ephemeral one. 



Hypotheses that are alternative possibilities are sometimes said 

 to be confusing. Yet equally well two hypotheses may be regarded 

 as more fruitful than one. It may rather be an advance, in prac- 

 tice, to mention more than one hypothesis in each relation, in order 

 not to limit the outlook or to make any one hypothesis seem too 

 serious. For, a hypothesis is a personal aid to comprehension and 

 a product of imagination, and there has been invented no means of 

 ascertaining how many hypotheses will be fitted by the same data. 

 Reasoning by exclusion hence is perhaps never conclusive. 



Evidently there are diverse grades of description, and to recom- 

 mend or to condemn all equally shows no acumen. ' ' Procedure by 

 construction is useful when it manifests something beside the juxta- 

 position" (Poincare, '13, p. 41). Even the merest description 

 involves much more thought in the making than is manifest in the 

 final record. While the conclusions generally lack the embellish- 

 ment of theories, in fact those who have worked by descriptive 

 methods know that rich ideas (hypotheses) initiated inquiry, 

 selected the measurements, and suggested the maps constructed. 

 The arrangements of materials confer the significances to human 

 view; further hypotheses are needed for successive rearrange- 

 ments. But, so far as human weaknesses allow, the hypotheses are 

 in descriptive work eliminated from the final product of investiga- 

 tion, and in no case are the cornerstones of it. Vanity hates to 

 strike out the charming hypotheses that enticed one into the 

 investigation. 



If there be a hypothesis involved in the representation on paper 

 of two simultaneously observed quantities, then this hypothesis is 

 equally inherent in any and all recording of data. If correlation 



