8 INTKODUCTION. 



would, as a class, have been the last persons, to 

 comprehend or approve of a scheme for navigating 

 the ocean by steam. When, for example, Universol- 

 ogy shall be found to affirm that there are at least 

 strong scientific presumptions and potent scientific 



determine the point would require extensive and critical examina- 

 tion. That I am not prepared to give, or, rather, not until your 

 book is fairly printed and laid before me in that shape. Nor do I 

 know that I am competent, or any more competent than any intel- 

 ligent man, to judge of it. Indeed, I doubt, whether, if you have 

 all you claim, the Scientific men, so-called, will be the first to ap- 

 preciate it. We are, he added, all intense specialists, and when the 

 Unitary Science comes in the world, it will be something so 

 entirely aside from our fixed habits of thought that I think it will 

 find its first appreciators, probably, among men of enlarged and 

 general culture, rather than among Specialists in Science. 



What, then, I asked, am I to do ? Is there no presiding Scientific 

 body competent and prepared to render a verdict on my labors ? 

 What of the French Academy ? To these questions he replied : If 

 you have what you think you have, God help you ! You must 

 work along as Christ did, and find, first, one disciple here and one 

 there, from all classes; from, most likely, what scientific men 

 would call ' the common people ! ' There is no body of Scientific 

 men on earth competent or ready to enter upon such an investiga- 

 tion, and as to the French Academy, they have had a by-law stand- 

 i:i^ for forty years which would prohibit them from even enter- 

 taining the consideration of the subject. 



We are, he repeated, all intense specialists. My own son is 

 laboring somewhat in your direction, [the Mathematics of Zoology, 

 a preeminent branch of Universological Science], and I decline 

 even to look at his diagrams. I confine myself to the merely 

 Observational study of a small branch of zoology, and have more 

 than I can possibly do. You will find all the rest of us [Specialists] 

 in the same fix, and the most difficult people in the world to call off 

 to look at any thing new, and not of our specialty. There, ho 



