138 



KNOWLEDGB ♦ 



[April 1, 1887. 



appeared to tliem alive again the third day, as the divine prophets 

 had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things con- 

 cerning him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are 

 not extinct at this day." (Book x\'iii. chap. iii. of the small edition 

 of Whiston's translation of Josephus.) 



* * *• 



The pas.sage here quoted is the now notorious interpola- 

 tion, too clumsily managed to deceive any, since it contra- 

 dicts the whole tenor of Josephus's writing.s in regard to 

 the promised Messiah, and, indeed, makes Josephus's whole 

 life self- contradictory. Even Canon Farrar, whose recepti- 

 vity in such matters is remarkable, says of the passage, it is 

 " interpolated if not wholly spurious"; and again, "Jose- 

 phus did not choose to make any allusion to facts which 

 were even remotely connected with the life of Christ." (See 

 Farrar's "Life of Christ," chap. vi. .3.) 



* * * 



The passage to which I referred runs thus : — 



" As I came back " (from Tcokoah) " I saw many captives cruci- 

 fied, and remembered three of them as my former acquaintance. 1 

 was very sorry at this in my mind, and went witli tears in my eyes 

 to Titus and told him of them ; so he immediately commanded them 

 to be taken down, and to have the greatest care taken of them, in 

 order to their recovery ; yet two of them died under the physician's 

 hands, while the third recovered." 



* 



* 



My " authority " for this is Josephus (see edition above 

 mentioned, " Life of Josephus," section 75). It should be 

 remembered that this account of the resuscitation of one of 

 three crucified persons, under the care of Joseph the 

 Asamonean, was published at least a quarter of a century 

 before the account in the Gospel " ncrording to Matthew," of 

 how Joseph the Arimathean went to Pilate and begged for 

 the body of Jesus, that one of three crucified persons who.'^e 

 restoration to life that Gospel records. 



* * * 



Not ten years have passed since Brigham Young died. 

 Hundreds saw him dead, and all the circumstances of his 

 last illness and death are known. It will h.ardly be believed 

 that in the.se matter-of-fact days the believers in Young, as 

 chief of the Latter Day Saints, assert that he is now alive 

 again. 



* * * 



Since Mr. Boss started, and Professor Piazzi Smyth 

 adopted, the mistake into which several others (I being 

 one) rather naturally fell, of regarding the comet of 1882 

 as the same body as the comets of 1880, 1843, and 16G8, I 

 have maintained the probability that all these comets were 

 originally one, which was dissipated into several com- 

 ponents long ago, and that more fragments may still arrive. 

 It seems as though the large comet recently discovered con- 

 firms the justice of this suggestion, for it is travelling in 

 the same track near the sun as was followed by the comets 

 of 1668, 1843, 1880, and 1882. 



I RECENTLY had occasion to note, in connection with this 

 same comet of 1882, a curious illustration of the unfair 

 way in which men are apt to be treated who announce and 

 correct their own mistakes as freely as they would those 

 they had detected in the work of others. It was, as is well 

 known, Mr. Boss in America who, immediately after the 

 discovery of the comet of 1882, started the idea that it was 

 the comet of 1880 and 1S43 comeback again. Professor 

 Piazzi Smyth eagerly seized the notion, because it confirmed, 

 as he thought, his belief that the end of the world was to 

 be brought about at this time, the second coming of Christ 



(which Christ himself, according to the Gospels, regarded as 

 " the end of the world "), being definitely announced by the 

 grand gallery of the Pyramid of Cheops, for July 1882. 

 But others fell also into the error, at that time a very 

 natural one, of supposing that the practical identity of the 

 perihelion parts of those comets' orbits implied the identity 

 also of the comets. I was one of these ; Mr. Hind, of the 

 Nautical Almanac, was another. I was the first to point 

 out that we had been deceived. The coincidence in ques- 

 tion could not be accidental ; btit also it could not be 

 explained as we had endeavoured to explain it. 



* * * 



But because I, being neither the first nor the second to fall 

 into a certain very natural mistake, was the first to indicate its 

 nature (and have been alone, to the best of my knowledge, 

 in carefully announcing and correcting it), it appears that 

 many have fallen into the bj' no means natural error of 

 supposing that to me belongs the chief discredit, such as it 

 may be, for making the original mistake. Recently, an 

 ardent admirer of Professor Smyth's pyramidal theories, 

 having occasion to fall foul of me because I regard the 

 stone bible theory of the pyramid as erroneous (to begin 

 with, and a trifie blasphemous, to goon with), took occasion 

 in a magazine of his, called Ford's ChriHian Jie])osit07y, to 

 proclaim lustily that my opinion need not be regarded as of 

 any weight, since I had made this particular error, whereof 

 he spoke as of a blunder by which I had notoriously in- 

 curred discredit. Of course, this gave one some interesting 

 amusement in opening the Rev. Mr. Ford's highly Christian 

 optics, by fir.st showing how imimportant the mistake really 

 was, and then mentioning casually that, such as it was, his 

 protr'r/e, Professor Smyth, had had much more to do with its 

 adoption than I had. But I venture to insist that while 

 making mistakes proves (according to the true saying of 

 Liebig) that a man's mind is fecund — the man who makes 

 no mistakes being necessarily a dullard — acknowledging a 

 mi.stake frankly, fully, and early, should engender con- 

 fidence not doubt in the man who has thus erred and 

 admitted it. 



* * * 



" Show me a man who has made no mistakes," said 

 Liebig, " and I will show you a man who has discovered 

 nothing." Show me a man, I would add, who has never 

 acknowledged a mistake, and I will show you one who, 

 unless he be one of Liebig's dullards, is dishonest and 

 untruthful. He has done more harm to science by bad 

 example than could be repaid by any number of brilliant 

 discoveries. 



* * * 



It is strange how weak some men are about this matter 

 of recognising and admitting error. Unfortunately the 

 weaklings in this respect judge others by themselves. I 

 have a friend (supposing I have not lest him of late) who 

 up to some ten years since scarcely let a month pass with- 

 out some noteworthy discovery, and whose work therefore I 

 never tired of dwelling upon with enthusiasm. But during 

 the last ten years or so he has announced no discoveries of 

 any interest (if any at all), and naturally I have been silent. 

 A year ago I went so far as to suggest, with complimentary 

 reference to his past achievements, a hope that we should 

 soon hear of others as noteworthy — e.sj)ecially as he has 

 been placed in charge of a much more powerful telescope 

 than he formerly had. Ever since, he has laboured under 

 the truly amazing idea that I no longer praise his work 

 because he has not yet accepted my theory of comets and 

 meteors ! Among those who read these lines there must I 

 think be many thousands who within the last year have 



