NATURAL SCIENCE TO GENERAL SCIENCE. 11 



[earning buried in catalogues, lexicons, and indexes looks as 

 bare and uninviting as the soil of a farm ; the uninitiated cannot 

 Bee or appreciate the labour and capital already invested there ; 

 to them the work of the ploughman seems infinitely dull, weary, 

 and monotonous. But though the compiler of a lexicon or of 

 a system of natural history must be prepared to encounter 

 labour as weary and as obstinate as the ploughman's, yet it 

 need not be supposed that his work is of a low type, or that it is 

 by any means as dry and mechanical as it looks when we have 

 it before us in black and white. In this, as in any other sort of 

 scientific work, it is necessary to discover every fact by careful 

 observation, then to verify and collate them, and to separate 

 what is important from what is not. All this requires a 

 man with a thorough grasp both of the object of the 

 compilation and of the matter and methods of the science; 

 and for such a man every detail has its bearing on the 

 whole, and its special interest. Otherwise dictionary-making 

 would be the vilest drudgery imaginable. 1 That the influence 

 of the progressive development of scientific ideas extends to 

 these works is obvious from the constant demand for new 

 lexicons, new natural histories, new digests, new catalogues of 

 stars, all denoting advancement in the art of methodising and 

 organising science. 



But our knowledge is not to lie dormant in the shape of 

 catalogues. The very fact that we must carry it about in black 

 and white shows that our intellectual mastery of it is incomplete. 

 It is not enough to be acquainted with the facts; scientific 

 knowledge begins only when their laws and their causes are un- 

 veiled. Our materials must be worked up by a logical process; 

 and the first step is to connect like with like, and to elaborate a 

 general conception embracing them all. Such a conception, as 

 the name implies, takes a number of single facts together, and 

 stands as their representative in our mind. We call it a general 

 conception, or the conception of a genus, when it embraces a 

 number of existing objects; we call it a law when it embraces a 

 beries of incidents or occurrences. When, for example, I havo 

 1 Condendaque lexi^a mandat damnatis. TB. 



