PROGRESSIVENESS OF SCIENCE. 43 



the less there is of specialised mechanism transmitted 

 by heredity, the better. The loss of instinct is 

 what permits and necessitates the education of the 

 receptive brain.' ^ * 



In this book-ridden age when the student so often 

 laboriously uses another's eyes instead of lifting his 

 own, and when many, as a stern critic has said, 

 " seem unable to cerebrate except in the presence of 

 print," the hasty wish has sometimes been expressed 

 that all books could be burned. But, however, in- 

 teresting the century succeeding the conflagration 

 might be — with enthusiastic reconstructing of the 

 classics from reminiscences and with uninhibited in- 

 dependence of inquiry — it is probably safe to say 

 that men would return to the conclusion which we 

 are now expounding, that the first condition of the 

 progressiveness of the sciences is in permanent 

 methods of external registration. Extraordinary, 

 indeed, would be the calamity if the Temple of 

 Science should fall like the Tower of Babel, if all 

 the living embodiments of science should suddenly 

 disappear, if all the instruments and inventions which 

 are suggestive symbols of hard-won generalisations 

 should be lost, if all the phrases which condense 

 discoveries into formulae should be wiped out of 

 human language — then we should have to begin at 

 the beginning again. The prime condition of the 

 progressiveness of science is in external modes of 

 registration, — ^in words and formulae, symbols and 

 instruments. 



THE FACT OF PROGRESS. 



In an eloquent lecture on " The Progressive- 

 ness of the Sciences," the late Principal John 

 *E. Ray Lankester, Nature^ LXL, 1900, p. 625, 



