SCIENCE IN "BONDAGE" 87 



ginners, and I suppose there is no offence in 

 applying this harmless epithet to both Mr. Grant 

 Allen and Mr. Clodd, so far as the truths of 

 dynamics and physics are concerned." One last 

 quotation : " The thing which strikes one most 

 forcibly about the physics of these paper philo- 

 sophers is the extraordinary contempt which, if 

 they are consistent, they must or ought to feel 

 for men of science. If Newton, Lagrange, Gauss, 

 and Thompson, to say nothing of smaller men, 

 have muddled away their brains in concocting a 

 scheme of dynamics wherein the very definitions 

 are all wrong ; if they have arrived at a law of 

 conservation of energy without knowing what 

 the word energy means, or how to define it ; if 

 they have to be set right by an amateur who has 

 devoted a few weeks or months to the subject 

 and acquired a rude smattering of some of its 

 terms, ' what intolerable fools they must all be ! ' 

 Such is the result of asserting one's freedom by 

 escaping the limitations of knowledge ! We see 

 what happens when a person sets out to deal with 

 science untrammelled by any considerations as 

 to what others have thought and established. 

 The necessary result is that he plunges headfore- 

 most into all or most of the errors which were 

 pitfalls to the first labourers in the field. Or, 

 again, he painfully and uselessly pursues the blind 

 alleys which they had wandered in, and from 

 which a perusal of their works would have warned 

 off later comers. 



Oh, irony of fate ! the same thing precisely 

 happens when men of scientific eminence indulge 



