256 SCIENCE IN SHORT CHAPTERS. 



" if at the present instant no such life existed upon this 

 earth, one such stone falling upon it might, by what we 

 blindly call natural causes, lead to its becoming covered 

 with vegetation." 



The conclusion of this paragraph is instructively charac- 

 teristic of the philosophy of Sir William Thomson and his 

 admirers. He says that " the hypothesis that life origi- 

 nated on this earth through moss-grown fragments of another 

 world may seem wild and visionary ; all I maintain is that 

 it is not unscientific" 



I have italicized the phrases which, put together, express 

 the philosophy of this school of modern manufacturers of 

 mathematical hypotheses. It matters not to them how 

 " wild and visionary," how utterly gratuitous any assump- 

 tion may be, it is not unscientific provided it can be in- 

 vested in formulae, and worked out mathematically. These 

 transcendental mathematicians are struggling to carry phi- 

 losophy back to the era of Duns Scotus, when the greatest 

 triumph of learning was to sophisticate so profoundly an 

 obvious absurdity that no ordinary intellect could refute it. 



Fortunately for the progress of humanity, there are other 

 learned men who firmly maintain that the business of 

 science is the discovery and teaching of simple sober truth. 



The writer of the Daily News article above referred 

 to very charitably suggests that Sir W. Thomson may be 

 "poking fun at some of his colleagues," and compares the 

 moss-grown meteorite hypothesis with the Hindoo parable 

 which explains the stability of the earth by stating that it 

 stands on the back of a monster tortoise, that the tortoise 

 rests upon the back of a gigantic elephant, which stands 

 upon the shell of a still bigger tortoise, resting on the back 

 of another still more gigantic elephant, and so on. Sir "W. 

 Thomson, of course, requires to smash two more worlds in 

 order to provide a moss-grown fragment for starting thv 

 life upon the world which was broken up for our benefit, 

 and so on backwards ad infinitum. 



