Grror 

 Srrors 



SCIENTIFIC SIDE-LIGHTS 



216 



ciples in medieval Christendom. Their be- 

 lief that matter might be transmuted or 

 transformed led many of them to spend their 

 lives among their furnaces and alembics in 

 the attempt to turn baser metals into gold. 

 . To modern chemists, who would not be sur- 

 prised to find all the many so-called ele- 

 ments proved to be forms of one matter, the 

 alchemists' idea does not seem quite unrea- 

 sonable in itself, and practically it led them 

 to the pursuit of truth by experiment, so 

 that tho they found no philosopher's stone, 

 they were repaid by discoveries such as alco- 

 hol, ammonia, sulfuric acid. Their method, 

 being founded on trials of real fact, cleared 

 itself more and more from the magical folly 

 it had grown up with, and the alchemist pre- 

 pared the way for the later chemist. TYLOB 

 Anthropology, ch. 13, p. 328. (A., 1899.) 



1053. ERROR INSEPARABLE FROM 

 INVESTIGATION Cope has been much 

 criticized for the mistakes and false gener- 

 alizations he made. Unquestionably he did 

 make many. But error seems to be insepa- 

 rable from investigation, and if he made 

 more than the other great masters, he cov- 

 ered more ground and did more work. He 

 was also, it must be admitted, more hasty 

 than some others in that he availed himself 

 of the more frequent means of publication 

 he enjoyed. GILL Proc. Amer. Assoc. for the 

 Advancement of Science, vol. xlvi. (1897.) 



1054. ERROR MAGNIFIED IN POP- 

 ULAR BELIEF Supposed Hollow Interior 

 of the Earth "Symmes's Hole." Leslie has 

 ingeniously conceived the nucleus of the 

 world to be a hollow sphere, filled with an 

 assumed " imponderable matter, having an 

 enormous force of expansion." These ven- 

 turesome and arbitrary conjectures have 

 given rise, in wholly unscientific circles, to 

 still more fantastic notions. The hollow 

 sphere has by degrees been peopled with 

 plants and animals, and two small subter- 

 ranean revolving planets Pluto and Pros- 

 erpine were imaginatively supposed to 

 shed over it their mild light; as, however, 

 it was further imagined that an ever-uni- 

 form temperature reigned in these internal 

 regions, the air, which was made self-lumi- 

 nous by compression, might well render the 

 planets of this lower world unnecessary. Near 

 the north pole, at 82 latitude, whence the 

 polar light emanates, was an enormous open- 

 ing, through which a descent might be made 

 into the hollow sphere, and Sir Humphry 

 Davy and myself were even publicly and fre- 

 quently invited by Captain Symmes to enter 

 upon this subterranean expedition: so pow- 

 erful is the morbid inclination of men to fill 

 unknown spaces with shapes of wonder, 

 totally unmindful of the counter-evidence 

 furnished by well-attested facts and uni- 

 versally acknowledged natural laws. HUM- 

 BOLDT Cosmos, vol. i, p. 171. (H., 1897.) 



1055. ERROR OF CLAIMING TOO 



MUCH Unsupported Assumptions Discredit 

 True Doctrines The Atomic Theory Over- 



loaded. Speculators have often erred in at- 

 tempting to elaborate their hypotheses too 

 fully, and, by making assumptions which 

 have afterwards proved to be improbable or 

 untenable, have brought discredit on views 

 which, in their essentials, were of great 

 value. . . . All we can say at present 

 is that by no chemical or physical process 

 known to us do atoms undergo division or 

 transformation to an extent appreciable by 

 chemical methods. An atom of carbon al- 

 ways acts with the combining weight 12 ; if 

 it consist of several independent parts, we 

 do not know it, because, in all reactions thus 

 far known, these parts always act together. 

 The idea of the transmutation of the ele- 

 ments, while resting at present on a very 

 slender basis, is entirely justifiable as a 

 working hypothesis. STOKES The Atomic 

 Theory from the Chemical Standpoint in 

 Science. N. S. vol. xi, No. 277, Apr. 20, 1900. 



1056. ERROR ONCE UNIVERSAL 



Frogs, Eels, Shell-fish, Caterpillars, Ser- 

 pents, Rats, and Mice Credited with Spon- 

 taneous Generation. The checks which ex- 

 perience alone can furnish being absent, the 

 spontaneous generation of creatures quite 

 as high as the frog in the scale of being was 

 assumed for ages to be a fact. Here, as else- 

 where, the dominant mind of Aristotle 

 stamped its notions on the world at large. 

 For nearly twenty centuries after him men 

 found no difficulty in believing in cases of 

 spontaneous generation which would now be 

 rejected as monstrous by the most fanatical 

 supporter of the doctrine. Shell-fish of all 

 kinds were considered to be without pa- 

 rental origin. Eels were supposed to spring 

 spontaneously from the fat ooze of the Nile. 

 Caterpillars were the spontaneous products 

 of the leaves on which they fed; while 

 winged insects, serpents, rats, and mice were 

 all thought capable of being generated with- 

 out sexual intervention. TYNDALL Frag- 

 ments of Science, vol. ii, ch. 13, p. 290. (A., 

 1900.) 



1057. ERRORS OF EDUCATORS 



Man Viewed as an Instrument Knowledge 

 Valued More than Culture. Now the va- 

 rious opinions which prevail concerning the 

 comparative utility of human sciences and 

 studies, have all arisen from two errors. 

 The first of these consists in viewing man, 

 not as an end unto himself, but merely as a 

 mean organized for the sake of something 

 out of himself ; and, under this partial view 

 of human destination, those branches of 

 knowledge obtain exclusively the name of 

 useful which tend to qualify a human being 

 to act the lowly part of a dexterous instru- 

 ment. The second, and the more dangerous 

 of these errors, consists in regarding the cul- 

 tivation of our faculties as subordinate to 

 the acquisition of knowledge, instead of re- 

 garding the possession of knowledge as sub- 

 ordinate to the cultivation of our faculties ; 

 and, in consequence of this error, those 

 sciences which afford a greater number of 



