74 SEVEN-YEAR SLEEPERS 



than the scientific inquirer. Knowing himself, by painful 

 experience, how extremely difficult a matter it is to make 

 perfectly sure you have observed anything on earth quite 

 correctly, and have eliminated all possible chances of error, 

 he acquires the fixed habit of doubting about one-half of 

 whatever his fellow -creatures tell him in ordinary conversa- 

 tion, without for a single moment venturing to suspect them 

 of deliberate untruthfulness. Children and servants, if they 

 find that anything they have been told is erroneous, immedi- 

 ately jump at the conclusion that the person who told them 

 meant deliberately to deceive them ; in their own simple 

 and categorical fashion they answer plurnply, ' That's a lie.' 

 But the man of science is only too well acquainted in his 

 own person with the exceeding difficulty of ever getting at 

 the exact truth. He has spent hours of toil, himself, in 

 watching and observing the behaviour of some plant, or 

 animal, or gas, or metal ; and after repeated experiments, 

 carefully designed to exclude all possibility of mistake, so 

 far as he can foresee it, he at last believes he has really 

 settled some moot point, and triumphantly publishes his 

 final conclusions in a scientific journal. Ten to one, the 

 very next number of that same journal contains a dozen 

 supercilious letters from a dozen learned and high-salaried 

 professors, each pointing out a dozen distinct and separate 

 precautions which the painstaking observer neglected to 

 take, and any one of which would be quite sufficient to vitiate 

 the whole body of his observations. There might have been 

 germs in the tube in which he boiled the water (germs are 

 very fashionable just at present) ; or some of the germs 

 might have survived and rather enjoyed the boiling ; or 

 they might have adhered to the under surface of the cork ; 

 or the mixture might have been tampered with during the 

 experimenter's temporary absence by his son, aged ten years 

 (scientific observers have no right, apparently, to have sons 



