A Century of /Science 21 



spider and every lobster is made up of just twenty 

 segments ? Is it not enough to know the fact ? 

 Children must not ask too many questions. It is 

 the business of science to gather facts, not to seek 

 for hidden implications. Such was the mental at 

 titude into which men of science were quite com 

 monly driven, between 1830 and 1860, by their de 

 sire to blink the question of evolution. A feeling 

 grew up that the true glory of a scientific career was 

 to detect for the two hundredth time an asteroid, 

 or to stick a pin through a beetle with a label at 

 tached bearing your own latinized name, Browni^ 

 or Jonesii, or Robinsoniense. This feeling was 

 especially strong in France, and was not confined 

 to physical science. It was exhibited a few years 

 later in the election of some Swedish or Norwegian 

 naturalist (whose name I forget) to the French 

 Academy of Science instead of Charles Darwin : 

 the former had described some new kind of fly, 

 the latter was only a theorizer! The study of 

 origins in particular was to be frowned upon. In 

 1863 the Linguistic Society of Paris passed a by 

 law that no communications bearing upon the ori 

 gin of language would be received. In the same 

 mood, Sir Henry Maine s treatise on &quot;Ancient Law &quot; 

 was condemned at a leading American university : 

 it was enough for us to know our own laws ; those 



