SCIENTIFIC HYPOTHESES 201 



them. It is a great thing to know that there is one less of the 

 useless tools for them to waste their efforts upon in a fruitless 

 handling. The regions of the Unknown and even the frontiers 

 of the Known, are strewn with such deceptive and futile tools, so 

 full of promise, but so unavailing when they are tested, and so 

 impossible to detect at sight from the tools of truer metal, that it 

 is imperative all within our range must be tried before a 

 real step in advance can be accomplished. Biology and Medicine 

 to-day owe a forward advance of at least sixty years to the fact 

 that Lamarck formulated this worldng hypothesis of the trans- 

 mission of acquired characters, that Darwin tentatively used it, 

 and that Weismann and others, using it yet more fully, tested it 

 thoroughly and found it wanting. Had this hypothesis never been 

 formulated, we should to-day on matters of the most profound 

 importance — questions for instance that came before the De- 

 partmental Committee on Physical Deterioration and before the 

 Royal Commission on the Care of the Feeble-Minded — have been 

 sixty years to the rear of the vanguard of the knowledge of to-day. 

 And this important advance, so intimately affecting our national 

 worth, has alone been possible because a working hypothesis 

 " has been put upon the scrap-heap." 



We may speak of these exploded derelicts as scrap- 

 heaps if we like. In doing so, we are really describing 

 their real nature. There is a similarity between these 

 discarded hypotheses of men of science and the pile of broken, 

 rusted, and antiquated machinery of the manufacturer. 

 And it is not only important but just to remember that the 

 materials of a scrap-heap, historically or economically, represent 

 a value almost infinitely greater than that of " old iron." The 

 value of an engine consigned to the scrap-heap is not measured 

 merely by its weight of metal at current prices, but in the history 

 of mankind it will be valued by the nature and quantity of the 

 work it accomplished in the days when it was the " latest thing " 

 and was being worked at its highest expedient pressure. And, 

 similarly, in the history of mankind we shall not value sailing 

 ships by their worth to-day, and think that because they have 

 been superseded by " Lusitanias " and other steam leviathans, 

 they have been useless in the service of man, or valueless in deter- 

 mining the present polity of nations or the present distribution of 

 human races. The value of sailing craft will not be historically 

 measured by what they are worth to-day as a means of transit be- 

 tween Europe and America, but rather by the historical con- 

 sequences that have arisen because they were the craft which con- 

 veyed Columbus and others to America and opened that vast region 

 to Europeans. In old days the corn was cut solely with the scythe, 

 but as an efficient instrument of the present it is now to a large 



