54 ESSAYS OF A BIOLOGIST 



musicians is greater or has achieved finer things than 

 any other of the number. What is more, in most 

 arts — notably sculpture, painting, and poetry — the 

 possibilities of expression and achievement do not 

 increase, and once a certain pitch of skill is reached, 

 tend to extinguish themselves in technique and 

 virtuosity. When this happens, new ideas generally 

 come upon the scene and work up again from a re- 

 latively primitive to a complicated technique along a 

 more or less different path — ^and so on and so forth 

 ad infinitum. 



This is not so true of architecture, and still less so 

 of music. In intellectual matters it is clearly not 

 true of mathematics, where each advance provides 

 the foundation for the solution of more complex 

 problems, nor, similarly, of much of science. But 

 even in this intellectual domain, where the accumula- 

 tion of knowledge is so evident, where the increasing 

 difficulty and complexity of the problems soluble and 

 solved is so remarkable — even here the individual 

 achievement can scarcely be properly said to increase, 

 certainly not the individual merit or the individual 

 satisfaction. Newton's achievement was no less 

 splendid because to-day any fourth-rate mathematician 

 can use the calculus, nor Euclid's for that his dis- 

 coveries can be explained to every schoolboy ; while 

 for Harvey to discover the circulation of the blood 

 or for Dalton to demonstrate the particulate nature 

 of matter was certainly no slighter task than that 



