v.] VALUE OF NATURAL HISTORY SCIENCES. 67 



real advantage lies in the point and polish of the swordsman s 

 weapon ; in the trained eye quick to spy out the weakness of 

 the adversary ; in the ready hand prompt to follow it on the 

 instant. But, after all, the sword exercise is only the hewing 

 and poking of the clubman developed and perfected. 



So, the vast results obtained by Science are won by no 

 mystical faculties, by no mental processes, other than those 

 which are practised by every one of us, in the humblest and 

 meanest affairs of life. A detective policeman discovers a burglar 

 from the marks made by his shoe, by a mental process identical 

 with that by which Cuvier restored the extinct animals of 

 Montinartre from fragments of their bones. Nor does that 

 process of induction and deduction by which a lady, finding 

 a stain of a peculiar kind upon her dress, concludes that some 

 body has upset the inkstand thereon, differ in any way, in 

 kind, from that by which Adams and Leverrier discovered a 

 new planet. 



The man of science, in fact, simply uses with scrupulous 

 exactness, the methods which we all, habitually and at every 

 moment, use carelessly ; and the man of business must as much 

 avail himself of the scientific method must be as truly a man of 

 science as the veriest bookworm of us all ; though I have no 

 doubt that the man of business will find himself out to be a 

 philosopher with as much surprise as M. Jourdain exhibited, 

 when he discovered that he had been all his life talking prose. 

 If, however, there be no real difference between the methods 

 of science and those of common life, it would seem, on the face 

 of the matter, highly improbable that there should be any 

 difference between the methods of the different sciences ; never 

 theless, it is constantly taken for granted, that there is a very 

 wide difference between the Physiological and other sciences in 

 point of method. 



In the first place it is said and I take this point first, because 

 the imputation is too frequently admitted by Physiologists 

 themselves that Biology differs from the Physico-chemical and 

 Mathematical sciences in being &quot; inexact.&quot; 



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