150 THE UNIVERSE 



exclaim with Portia, "My little body is aweary 

 of this great world." 



I find a very sensible editorial in the New York 

 American of April 18th, 1903, entitled "Science 

 Needs Another Interpreter." It says : "Science is 

 moving too fast for the ordinary layman, who 

 would like to keep pace with its theories and dis- 

 coveries Chemistry and physics needs a man 



who will do for them what Huxley did for biology 

 a man who has not only a scientific mind but a lit- 

 erary capacity Vaguely the layman knows 



there have been all sorts of discoveries since the 

 X-rays showed him there was a way of seeing 

 through a grindstone. 



"But he had the idea of X-rays only partially di- 

 gested when science came on him with the cathode 

 rays and crowned the confusion by discovering 

 radium. With a mind dazzled by light rays that are 

 invisible, and invisible rays that are not light, and 

 bewildered by being told of a substance that gives 

 off terrific energy without loss of bulk or power, 

 he lays away the natural philosophy of his college 

 days and reaches blindly for what the new men 

 have written of these things. 



"He is then confronted with w^hat reads like a cata- 

 logue of fossil insects diversified by stepladder 

 algebraic formulas, the mere parenthesis of which 

 are enough to make a school teacher shudder. The 

 wretched seeker after knowledge is confronted with 

 measurements of light waves until sunbeams are 

 powerless to illuminate the day. Similarly he gath- 

 ers from the fugitive words he understands among 

 the mass that has no meaning for him, that Prof. 

 Loeb has been putting salt on eggs and creating 



