2 PROGRESS OF SCIENCE IN THE CENTURY. 



facts and classify them, detect their inter-relations 

 and formulate their sequences, there is science. The 

 subject of enquiry may be man or beast, star or 

 tree, a language or the atmosphere, institutions or 

 fossils, the growth of ideas or the development of 

 an egg — all come within the scope of scientific en- 

 quiry whose far-off goal is an interpretation of the 

 known world. The distinctive feature is in the 

 method, — making sure of facts, observing their inter- 

 relations, grouping them according to their like- 

 nesses of sequence, and inventing descriptive for- 

 mulse which sum them up. Facts are essential, 

 but it is evident that they alone do not constitute a 

 science; they must be correlated, interpreted, for- 

 mulated. As Sir Lyon Playfair once put it,* 

 " isolated facts may be viewed as the dust of science, '' 

 — dust only, but dust is not to be despised, for, 

 as he went on to say, ^^ to it when the rays of light 

 act upon its floating particles we owe the blue of the 

 heavens and the glories of the sky." 



Though it may sound for a moment like a paradox, 

 the scientific mood does not necessarily involve any 

 particular knowledge of this or that science. 

 Many business men, for instance, who are almost 

 quite ignorant of chemistry or physics, botany 

 or zoology, astronomy or geology, but who have 

 carefully disciplined themselves in regard to some 

 restricted series of facts involved in their daily 

 work, have acquired the scientific mood in a high 

 degree of development. The same may be said of 

 many a one well disciplined in the '^ Humanities," 

 though his title of " scholar " is often used as if it 

 stood in antithesis to " man of science." 



* Pres. Address, Rep. Brit. Ass. for 1885. p. 18, 



