8 SCIENCE AND LIFE 



human consequences. More serious consequences 

 have attended the overweighting of education by 

 dead and moribund habits of thought than would 

 have attended an overweighting of education with 

 science. So great is the discontinuity between the 

 present and any previous period. 



One may believe that the human aspect of learn- 

 ing, if it is the highest, is also the last aspect to be 

 achieved, and if no adequate appreciation of the older 

 humanities can be arrived at without long prepara- 

 tion in the grammar and etymology of ancient 

 languages, so no adequate appreciation of the newer 

 scientific humanities can be derived without a long 

 discipline in the grammar and principles of science. 

 In spite of all make-believe to the contrary, this is 

 the age of science. 



One may walk through any city, as the early 

 Greek sculptor did in his day, absorbing uncon- 

 sciously from its medley of sights and sounds the 

 fleeting impressions which, in a trained mind, fuse 

 together and congeal, epitomising for all time the 

 animation of a moment. Science is not sculpturing 

 from models. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. 

 But the workmen are building in steel and the 

 designers are thinking in stone. 



THE NEED FOR ADAPTATION. 



Human nature, in general, is the result of an 

 age-long adaptation to what has been hitherto, for 

 any one country, an essentially unchanging physical 

 environment. Emigration to other countries, as in 

 the population of the Americas, produces corre- 

 sponding marked changes of human nature, and the 

 rapidity of these changes among the mixed popula- 

 tion which finds its way into the United States is 

 well known. The subjection of inanimate sources 



