15 



voluminous that it will baffle our successors even to house them. 

 As to reading them, I suppose that no one will ever try. It 

 would be quicker to ascertain by immediate personal enquiry 

 such facts of distribution, for instance, as are wanted for the 

 solution of a really scientific question, than to analyse and com- 

 pile the records. We have been for many years cataloguing in 

 the belief that our catalogues will some day yield scientific fruit. 

 If that hope has ever been realised in any appreciable degree, 

 the evidence is not known to me. 



Mechanical accumulation of facts, to be afterwards reduced 

 and rendered fruitful by an inductive method, was the dream of 

 Bacon. It has not been the practice of productive men of 

 science, who have recognised that you must put mind into 

 what you do, and have, therefore, from Newton to Darwin, 

 given the inductive philosophy a wide berth. 



*' There is an attemxpt at induction going on, which has yielded 

 little or no fruit, the observations made in the meteorological 

 observatories. This attempt is carried on in a manner which 

 would have caused Bacon to dance for joy ; for he lived in times 

 when Chancellors did dance. Russia, says M. Biot, is covered 

 by an army of meteorographs, with generals, high officers, sub- 

 alterns, and privates, with fixed and defined duties of observa- 

 tion. Other countries have also their systematic observations. 

 And what has come of it ? Nothing, says M. Biot, and nothing 

 will ever come of it : the veteran mathematician and experimental 

 philosopher declares, as does Mr. Ellis, that no single branch of 

 science has ever been fruitfully explored in this way. There is 

 no special object, he says."* 



'• There is no special object ! "That is the secret of the failure, and 

 all attempts to increase knowledge by labours without special 

 object will fail too. It is mere laborious idleness. Let us not 

 add to the pile of so-called scientific literature which has no 

 special object, which amiably hopes that at some future time it 

 may prove useful in a way that no one at present foresees. 

 These things interest no human being because they have never 

 in truth been warmed by lying in any human mind ; they have 

 been mechanically compiled, and they are dead and heavy as 

 lead. 



I am glad to leave the critical part of my theme, and that for 

 more than one reason. For I have myself attempted this very 



* De Morgan, Budget of Paradoxes, p. 54. 



