550 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE. 



A GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE. 

 The increasing specialization of the 

 sciences and the consequent occupation 

 with the details and technical manipu- 

 lations of a specialty render it possible 

 for many a student to secure the equip- 

 ment needed for his immediate activity, 

 with but little appreciation of the gen- 

 eral principles that give direction and 

 solidarity to his science, or of the more 

 general and fundamental conceptions 

 which the various sciences and the 

 spirit and progress of science as a 

 whole have in common. The student 

 runs the danger of gaining a certain 

 familiarity with the vocabulary and the 

 usage of the language of science, but of 

 ignoring its grammar. One of the pur- 

 poses met by Prof. Karl Pearson's 'The 

 Grammar of Science' is to give the seri- 

 ous student an opportunity to acquaint 

 himself with these underlying concep- 

 tions — cause and effect and probability, 

 space and time, motion and matter and 

 the composition of the physical and or- 

 ganic worlds. It discusses with him 

 and for him the nature of the knowing 

 process, and demonstrates how the sci- 

 ences stand — not for a literal copy of 

 reality, but represent a special abstrac- 

 tion and construction on the basis of ex- 

 perience, which serve the purposes of 

 intelligibility and logical system. A 

 law of nature is not an objective reality, 

 but "a resumS in mental shorthand, 

 which replaces for us a lengthy descrip- 

 tion of the sequences of our sense-im- 

 pressions. Law in the scientific sense 

 . . . owes its existence to the crea- 

 tive power of his [man's] intellect." 

 Science is thus not the mere reflection of 

 perceptual experience, but is dependent 

 for its advance quite as much upon the 

 formation of appropriate conceptions by 

 the exercise of insight and a keen logi- 

 cal analysis and synthesis. Hence, the 

 importance of the imagination as a 

 requisite for scientific discovery, which 



leads Professor Pearson to regard Dar- 

 win and Faraday as superior in this 

 quality to the best of the poets and 

 novelists. Not only the content of the 

 sciences but the spirit and the means 

 that guide its advance form part of the 

 grammar of science. The nature of the 

 scientific method, the appreciation that 

 the scope of science is really coincident 

 with the scope of verifiable knowledge; 

 that science represents a mode of ap- 

 proach and of inquiry, and that the sci- 

 entist or the scientifically-minded indi- 

 vidual is characterized by a definite 

 logical attitude, by a manner of enter- 

 ing into relation with his surroundings 

 and of dealing with reality; that science 

 discountenances attempted short-cuts 

 and inspired revelations, or guesses of 

 the riddles of existence; that it avoids 

 metaphysic and impractical specula- 

 tion; that it justifies its existence and 

 the energies which are expended on its 

 behalf by the mental training it pro- 

 vides in education, by its illumination 

 of the problems of life and society, by 

 the practical benefits it confers in the 

 various fields of human activity, as well 

 as by the gratification it yields to some 

 of the most permanent and most worthy 

 of our intellectual and aesthetic impulses 

 ■ — these and other propositions are ably 

 and interestingly presented and consti- 

 tute an essential portion of this very 

 stimulating and clarifying volume. The 

 success of the work is attested by the 

 appearance of this second edition; the 

 chief addition consists of a discussion 

 of the quantitative method as applied 

 to biological phenomena, which the 

 readers of others of the author's works 

 will recognize as one of his favorite sub- 

 jects of investigation. 



THE TEACHING OF ELEMENTARY 

 MATHEMATICS. 

 The book with the above title, by 

 David Eugene Smith, principal of the 



