EVOLUTION THEORIES 228 



science from practice) or more concretely 

 (experimental science as proletarian experience 

 and initiative), we cannot do better than 

 bring to these tests some of these great leaders 

 of science, whom the uninitiated still practi- 

 cally think of as magicians and wizards, much 

 as they did of their predecessors of old. Take, 

 then, Kelvin and Lister. Leaving aside the 

 too common Loncjon populace view, to whom 

 these names are impressive merely as Lords, 

 albeit a little lower than the brewers; or the 

 more educated London view, which would ap- 

 preciate them as successive Presidents of the 

 Royal Society, it is plain that a more real 

 and biographic understanding of the one is as 

 the farthest ranging of the mathematical and 

 the experimental physicists, both pure and 

 applied, and of the other as the renewer of 

 modern surgery. Biographically, we under- 

 stand Kelvin better in his lifelong environ- 

 ment of Glasgow; but only fully as we see its 

 significance, for one thing as the great fiord 

 of the iron shipbuilders, with their consequent 

 dangers of deranged compass and the like, 

 whence a well-known example of Kelvin's 

 experimental solutions. Here, too, arose 

 James Watt, with his Promethean control of 

 new energies; and here fitly also in turn 

 Kelvin to control the yet subtler and more 



