CHAPTER XXXI 

 MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT SCIENCE 



I SUBMIT, as the final chapter of this little volume of 

 miscellaneous diversions, a few words intended to 

 meet what has become a recurrent misrepresentation and 

 absurdity for which the annual congress of the British 

 Association for the Advancement of Science furnishes the 

 opportunity. Glib writers in various journals regularly 

 seize this occasion to pour forth their lamentations con- 

 cerning the incapacity of " science " and the disappoint- 

 ment which they experience in finding that it does not do 

 what it never professed to do. They deplore that those 

 engaged in the making of that new knowledge of nature 

 which we call " science " do not discover things which 

 they never set out to discover or thought it possible to 

 discover, although the glib gentlemen who write, with a 

 false assumption of knowledge, pretend that these things 

 are what the investigations of scientific inquirers are 

 intended to ascertain. We read, at that season of the 

 year, articles upon " What Scientists do not know " and 

 "The Bankruptcy of Science," in which it is pretended 

 that the purpose of science is to solve the mystery, or, as 

 it has been called, the " riddle," of the universe, and it is 

 pointed out, with something like malicious satisfaction, 

 that, to judge by the proceedings of the congress of 

 scientific investigators just concluded, we are no nearer a 

 solution of that mystery than men were in the days of 



