PERFECTION FAR DISTANT. 159 



contemporary, always manifested, however, in a spirit 

 worthy of the honourable feeling that should govern 

 men in scientific rivalry aiming at truth. 



If the morphologists differ as to type and organic 

 homologues, and occasionally land themselves in the 

 regions of pure transcendentalism, it should not be 

 overlooked that in the history of all science there are 

 vicissitudes in its progress as fickle as the meteorolo- 

 gical changes of an English atmosphere : that pluviose 

 and electrical clouds precede the clearer sky, and that 

 the pleasurable Phoebus of discovery comes post nubila 

 of doubts, difficulties, and disappointments. The 

 deep truths of morphology can only be reached by 

 repeated and successive tentative efforts, each of which 

 may possibly leave its residuum of error to be explained 

 in the course of time. Faults of judgment or the 

 errors of conception, so likely to arise in the study of 

 a science so complex and extended as the laws of life 

 and organisation, had better come forth with a modi- 

 cum of truth, than that observers should be too rigid 

 in waiting for the perfection of human thought, or the 

 establishment of a Newtonian Principia in physiology. 

 Professor Owen, in writing Goodsir in 1S61, on this 

 very subject of morphology that had engrossed both 

 their minds, admitted with philosophic candour that 

 his mistakes might constitute a good share, but he 

 always felt that science would get on quicker if 

 men would set forth their proceeds without being 

 over careful of the personal etleets of slight errors in 

 observation. 



