THE SPIRIT AND METHOD OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY. 201 



tirpate the aged. But as surely as the agnosticism of age is a witness 

 to the weariness of fruitless speculation, so surely the confidence of 

 youth that every movement must of necessity be forward is a proof 

 of insufficiency. 



Let the military art instruct us. The raw recruit is satisfied if 

 old Bliicher waves his sword, shouting, " Vorwarts ! " But the sobered 

 veteran is prepared to see in flank-movements, in retreats, in halts 

 and intrenchments, steps of the campaign as necessary as any charge 

 at double-quick on hostile lines, or a steady march in column into the 

 enemy's country. Let us suppose that in the last twelvemonth not 

 one surprising discovery in any region of the globe has been made ; 

 that a hundred previously reported facts have been examined and pro- 

 nounced untrue ; a hundred printed memoirs, widely read and criti- 

 cised, been proved mistaken or absurd ; a hundred long-accepted ge- 

 neric or specific names, fossil or recent, have been expunged from the 

 lists ; and that others, like Holy sites catenxdata or Spirifer disjuncta, 

 have lost their characteristic values ; suppose any amount of doubt 

 to have been thrown upon any number of popularly accepted theories, 

 by failures in applying them to practice, like the theory of the anti- 

 clinal location of gas-wells ; in a word, suppose any amount of smash- 

 ing in any department of the great crockery-shop of transcendental 

 or applied science — what does it imply but the tendency of all inquiry, 

 observation, investigation, and experiment toward the betterment, 

 which is the only true advancement, of science ? As, in the animal 

 kingdom, the peaceful kinds are offset and held in check by analogous 

 carnivores, for fear of over-population, so, in the world of thought, 

 the constructive theorists are perpetually preyed upon by a corre- 

 sponding class of natural enemies, the destructive critics, which keeps 

 the field open and the air sweet. The destruction of effete knowl- 

 edge is the perennial birth of that science which can not be destroyed. 

 But, in recognizing the fact, we should remember that there is a sci- 

 ence of items and a science of fundamentals, which bear a relation to 

 each other, like that which subsists between the individuals of a spe- 

 cies and species ^^er se / and that an indefinite multiplication of indi- 

 viduals may go on without any visible modification of their specific 

 character. The population of Europe has grown in the last century 

 from a hundred and fifty to three hundred and twenty millions of 

 souls ; but they are the same Teutons, Celts, and Slavs as ever. On 

 the other hand, the curve of population for France is almost a hori- 

 zontal straight line ; but their national advancement has been phe- 

 nomenal. What I wish to illustrate is this evident truth, that not by 

 the mere increment of number of facts learned, not by the mere mul- 

 tiplication of discoverers, teachers, and students of those facts, but by 

 the elevation of our aims, by the enlargement of our views, by the 

 refinement of our methods, by the ennoblement of our personalities, 

 and by these alone, can we rightly discover whether or not our asso- 



