THE PARASCEVE. 375 



commended more than 200 years ago ; why have you not tried that ? 

 You have been acting all the time like a king who should attempt 

 to conquer a country by encouraging private adventurers to make 

 incursions each on his own account, without any system of combined 

 movements to subdue and take possession. I see that wherever you 

 have the proper materials and plenty of them your work is excellent ; 

 so was Gilbert's in my time ; so was Galileo's ; nay even Kepler 

 though his method was as unskilful as that of the boy who in 

 doing a long-division sum would first guess at the quotient and then 

 multiply it into the divisor to see whether it were true, and if it 

 came out wrong would make another guess and multiply again, 

 and so on till he guessed right at last, yet because he had a 

 copious collection of materials ready to his hand, and enormous per- 

 severance however perversely applied, and a religious veracity, did 

 at last hit upon one of the greatest discoveries ever made by one man. 

 But what could Kepler have done without Tycho Brahe's tables of 

 observation ? And what might Galileo not have done if he had had 

 a large enough collection of facts ? This therefore it is that dis- 

 appoints me. I do not see any sufficient collection made of materials, 

 that is, of facts in nature or any effectual plan on foot for 

 making one. You are scarcely better off in that respect than 

 I was; you have each to gather the materials upon which you are 

 to work. You cannot build houses, or weave shirts, or learn 

 languages so. If the builder had to make his own bricks, the 

 weaver to grow his own flax, the student of a dead language to make 

 his own concordance, where would be your houses, your shirts, or 

 your scholars ? And by the same rule if the interpreter of Nature 

 is to forage for his facts, what progress can you expect in the art 

 of interpretation ? Your scholar has his dictionary provided to 

 his hand ; but your natural philosopher has still to make his dic- 

 tionary for himself. 



" And I wonder the more at this, because this is the very thing 

 of all others which I myself pointed out as absolutely necessary to 

 be supplied, as the thing which was to be set about in the first 

 place, the thing without which no great things could possibly be done 

 in philosophy. And since you have done me the honour to think so 

 very highly of my precepts, I am a little surprised that you have not 

 thought it worth while in so very essential a point to follow them. 

 And to say the truth, I could wish for my own reputation (if that 

 were of any consequence) that you had either honoured me a little 

 more in that way, or not honoured me quite so much in other 

 ways. You call me the Father of your Philosophy, meaning it for 

 the greatest compliment you can pay. I thank you for the compli- 

 ment, but I must decline the implied responsibility. I assure you 

 this is none of mine. May I ask whether any attempt has been 



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