THE CULTURE OF THE SCIENTIFIC MOOD. 131 
known as the ‘Bruce’ meteorite —a monster stranger 
from the skies weighing close upon four tons. It has had 
an interesting career. Where it came from, of course, no 
man knoweth, but it fell at Murrangeng, in S. Australia, 
Mr Bruce, who now lives in Scotland, bought it of a farmer, 
who had no use for meteorites, for £2 for the purpose of 
presenting it to the British Museum. The Government of 
Victoria interested itself in trying to retain the curiosity, 
and offered Mr Bruce £1000 for his rights, but the 
Scotsman replied that ‘money would not buy it’; so 
the article is now on the way over. It is composed of 
almost pure iron, and is said to be the most rare specimen 
of its sort in the world, though as to weight and 
composition it does not beat the forty-ton meteorite said 
to have been discovered by Sir John Ross in Greenland 
in 1818. Another celebrated meteorite, the ‘ Cranbourne, 
found in 1865 in Australia, which has been in England, 
has been repurchased by the colony and returned.” 
Now, to be quite frank, would we not have believed 
this—those of us who are not experts on meteorites— 
and yet it is absolute nonsense, a so-called ‘pure 
fabrication from Fleet St. Of course, whenever this is 
pointed out by the scientific person, we see that the 
Government of Victoria never would have offered £1000 
for a meteorite; that no Scot would ever have refused 
the sum; and we see the vast improbability that any 
treasure brought to England would be allowed to go away 
again. But did we see these and other marks of falsity 
—at first ? 
Another aspect of the quality of cautiousness which 
characterises the scientific mood is distrust of personal 
bias in forming judgments. It should always be possible 
to eliminate personal opinion from all scientific conclusions ; 
their validity, in fact, depends upon this. 
CLEARNESS OF VISION. 
A third characteristic of the scientific mood is dislike 
of obscurities, of blurred vision, of fogginess. We 
