SCIENCE IN " BOND AGE" 85 



conclusions as are obviously irreconcilable with it. 

 Surely this is plain common sense and the man 

 who acted otherwise would be setting himself a 

 quite impossible task. It is the weakness of the 

 " heuristic method " that it sets its pupils to find 

 out things which many abler men have spent 

 years in investigating. The man who sets out 

 to make a research, without first acertaining what 

 others have done in that direction, proposes to 

 accumulate in himself the abilities and the life- 

 work of all previous generations of labourers in 

 that corner of the scientific vineyard. 



There is a somewhat amusing and certainly 

 interesting instance of this which will bear 

 quotation. The late Mr. Grant Allen, who knew 

 something of quite a number of subjects though 

 perhaps not very much about any of them, de- 

 voted most of his time and energies (outside his 

 stones, some of which are quite entertaining) to 

 not always very accurate essays in natural history. 

 One day, however, his evil genius prompted him 

 to write and, worse still, to publish a book entitled 

 Force and Energy : A Theory of Dynamics, in 

 which he purported to deal with a matter of 

 which he knew far less even than he did about 

 animated nature. Mark the inevitable result ! 

 A copy of the book was forwarded to the journal 

 Nature, and sent by its editor to be dealt with 

 by the competent hands of Sir Oliver (then Pro- 

 fessor) Lodge. 1 



This is how that eminent authority dealt with 



1 The review from which the following quotations are made 

 appeared in Nature on January 24, 1889. 



