EVOLUTION THEORIES 223 



For fuller illustration — whether we state 

 on principle more abstractly (as the rise of 

 science from practice) — or more concretely 

 (experimental science as proletarian expe- 

 rience and initiative), we cannot do better 

 than bring to these tests some of these great 

 leaders of science, whom the uninitiated still 

 practically 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 London 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 appreciate them as suc- 

 cessive 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 ex- 

 perimental physicists, both pure and ap- 

 plied, and of the other as the renewer 

 of modern surgery. Biographically, we 

 understand Kelvin better in his lifelong 

 environment 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 com- 

 pass and the like, whence a well-known 

 example of Kelvin's experimental solutions. 

 Here, too, arose James Watt, with his Pro- 



