PUBLIC TEACHING. 



43 



little attention if it had not been forced into undeserved 

 notoriety in consequence of the support it seemed to 

 afford to modern matter-and-force views. 



There has been far too much tendency of late to 

 decide scientific questions by a show of hands. A 

 .very little tact is required to make a number of people 

 who know little about the matter look with favour 

 upon a new theory, for in their enthusiastic haste 

 to upset old creeds of which they are tired, they 

 are sure to neglect to ascertain whether the new one 

 they accept is really as reliable as the old one they 

 discard. But the cry " Hurrah for spontaneous gene- 

 ration," will not advance the cause, for happily, 

 science is not like politics, in which people may take 

 sides and settle things by acclamation, and action has 

 to be determined by expediency and a number of con- 

 siderations quite apart from the mere question of truth 

 or of fact. In science, views are changed in no time, 

 and theories most popular for a while are discarded 

 the instant some new fact is revealed. Nothing 

 can however retard scientific discovery more than the 

 attempt to convert scientific deliberations into mere 

 party questions. Science is open to all the world, and 

 although excuses have been made for spreading inac- 

 curacies on the ground that it was necessary to put the 

 subject in a form to please unlearned persons such 

 excuses are utterly inadmissible. The unlearned public 

 can understand any scientific question that is put before 

 them clearly if they choose to take the trouble to 



