270 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1941 



sumption, hidden in his mind and unrecognized, was that only 

 streams could have moved the boulders, and he knew that streams 

 cannot flow uphill. He overlooked the glaciers, although it is 

 evident that he already knew something of their power and habits. 

 Perhaps he assumed that those he saw around Mont Blanc had never 

 been much larger than they were in his day. 



Failing to understand what the real scientist must be and what 

 the essentials of science are, part of the public today is led to accept 

 as science various elaborations of intuition, speculation, and fancy, 

 such as were much more widely current a few centuries ago. To the 

 practitioners of this pseudo science, David Starr Jordan (1924), in 

 a humorous paper, once gave the name "Sciosophists." The term, he 

 explained in mock seriousness, comes from two Greek words, skios 

 meaning shadow, and sophos meaning wisdom, or in short "the 

 shadow of wisdom." Sciosophists, he said, are happily free from 

 the ordinary limitations of science for they are not hindered by the 

 need of evidence. To them one idea is as good as another, and so 

 why go through the laborious process of examining facts, searching 

 out all the evidence, and testing each explanation before accepting 

 it? A glittering and imposing structure can be built up with ease 

 by a sciosophist out of many such unverified suppositions; but, of 

 course, Jordan scarcely needed to say that it is as vulnerable to 

 critical analysis as a child's tower of blocks is to a touch of the hand. 

 It is regrettable, but in a free country perhaps unpreventable, that 

 the cloak of science should be donned and worn by faith healers and 

 other mystics who have no comprehension of the meaning of the 

 term. As a result, however, it is hardly surprising that part of the 

 general public has a rather confused impression about science, when 

 it reads serious accounts of such absurdities as a "science of astrol- 

 ogy," "the science of phrenology," and many others. 



That the scientific method had its beginning in the ancient Greek 

 and probably even earlier civilizations is clear enough, but it was 

 displayed by only a few of the philosophers of that era and not con- 

 sistently even by that few. This is all the more strange in view of 

 the fact that the art of reasoning — logic — was highly cultivated by 

 the Greeks. True, men like Anaxagoras at Athens had many sound 

 ideas and employed the scientific method to a notable extent, but at 

 the same time they entertained, as firm beliefs, some notions that 

 would now bring a laugh to any schoolboy. 



If one examines the writings of the founders of ancient Greek 

 science in the sixth century B. C. — men like Thales and Anaximan- 

 der — ^lie finds that many of their opinions were mere suppositions, 

 elaborated and bolstered with such support as labored argument and 

 ingenuity of words could give. These men were the precursors of 



