THE CENTURY'S GREAT MEN IN SCIENCE. 



By Charles S. Peirce. 



How .shall we determine that men are o-reat^ Who. for instance, 

 shall we say are the great men of science^ The men who iiave made 

 the great and fruitful discoveries'^ Such discoveries in the nineteenth 

 century have mostly been made independently by two or more j)ersons. 

 Darwin and Wallace sinudtaneously put forth the hyi)othesis of natural 

 selection. Clausius, Rankine, and Sadi-Carnot, perhaps KchiM. 

 worked out the mechanical theory of heat. Kronig. Clausius, Joule, 

 Herapath, Waterston, and Daniel Bernouilli independently suggested 

 the kinetical theorj^ of gases, I do not know how many minds besides 

 Robert Mayer, Colding, Joule, and Helmholtz hit upon the doctrine 

 of the conservation of energy. Faraday and floseph Henry l)rought 

 magneto-electricit}^ to light. The pack of writers who were on the 

 warm scent of the periodic law of the chemical elements approached 

 two hundred when the discover}^ itself, a most difficult inference, was 

 parti}' achieved by Lothar Meyer, wholly l)v ]\Iendeleef. When great 

 discoveries were thus in the air, shall that brain necessarily be deemed 

 great upon which the}' happened earliest to condense, or the man super- 

 eminent who, by the unmeaning rule of priority of publication, gets 

 the credit in brief statements i No, this method of estimation, natural 

 as it is to make success the standard of measure, will not do. 



Shall we, then, by a logical analysis, draw ui) an abstract definition 

 of greatness and call those men great who conform to it^ If there 

 were no dispute about the nature of greatness, this might pr()b:il»ly 

 prove the most convenient plan. It would be like a rule of giannntir 

 adduced to decide whether a phrase is good English or not. Nor 

 would the circumstance that the definition could not be as explicit and 

 determinate as a rule of granunar constitute a serious diflicidty. 

 Unfortunately, however, among the few writers who have seriously 

 studied the question, the most extreme differences prevail as to tiie 

 nature of great men. Some hold that they are fashioned of the most 

 ordinary ctay, and that only their rearing and environment, conjoined 



1 Copyright, TgOlTbv New York Evening Post Company. Reprinted fn.i.i The 

 Evening P^ost, January 12, 1901, by special permission of (J. I'. Putnat.i's Sons. 



693 



