THE HISTORY OF A DOCTRINE, 389 



direction, is singularly misleading; and I state this more con- 

 fidently here, because there are many in this audience who did 

 not get their knowledge of nature from books only, but who have 

 searched for the truth themselves ; and, speaking to them, may I 

 not say that those who have so searched know that the most honest 

 purpose and the most patient striving have not been guarantees 

 against mistakes— mistakes which were probably hailed at the 

 time as successes ? It was some one of the fraternity of seekers, 

 I am sure, who said, " Show me the investigator who has never 

 made a mistake, and I will show you one who has never made a 

 discovery." 



We have seen the whole scientific body, as regards this partic- 

 ular science of radiant energy, moving in a mass, in a wrong 

 direction, for a century ; we have seen that individuals in it go 

 on their independent paths of error ; and we can only wonder that 

 an era should have come in which such a real advance is made as 

 in ours. 



That era has been brought in by the works of many, but more 

 than by any other through the fact that in the year 1801 there 

 came into the world at Parma an infant who was born a physicist, 

 as another is born a poet ; nay, more ; who was born, one might 

 say, a devotee of one department of physics — that of radiant heat ; 

 being affected in his tenderest years with such a kind of preco- 

 cious passion for the subject as the childish Mozart showed for 

 music. He was ready to sacrifice everything for it ; he struggled 

 through untold difficulties, not for the sake of glory or worldly 

 profit, but for radiant heat's sake ; and when fame finally came to 

 him, and he had the right to speak of himself, he wrote a preface 

 to his collected researches, which is as remarkable as anything in 

 his works. In this preface he has given us, not a summary of pre- 

 vious memoirs on the subject, not a table of useful factors and 

 formulae, not anything at all that an English or American scien- 

 tific treatise usually begins with, but the ingenuous story of his 

 first love, of his boyish passion for this beloved mistress ; and all 

 this with a trust in us his readers which is beautiful in its child- 

 like confidence in our sympathy. I must abbreviate and injure 

 in order to quote ; but did ever a learned physical treatise and col- 

 lection of useful tables begin like this before ? — 



" I was born at Parma, and when I got a holiday used to go 

 into the country the night before and go to bed early, so as to get 

 up before the dawn. Then I used to steal silently out of the house, 

 and run, with bounding heart, till I got to the top of a little hill, 

 where I used to set myself so as to look toward the east." There, 

 he tells us, he used, in the stillness of nature, to wait the rising 

 sun, and feel his attention rapt, less with the glorious spectacle of 

 the morning light itself than with the sense of the mysterious 



