VALUE OF HYPOTHESIS. 15 



tion than in the facts of Nature. We can hardly call 

 those ages anything but speculative which received 

 with approval the suggestions that geese were de- 

 veloped from barnacles which grew upon trees ; that 

 swallows hibernated at the bottom of lakes ; that the 

 Trade-winds were due to the breath of a sea-weed. 

 Bateson's statement requires to be reversed in order 

 to become correct. Modern science differs from the 

 science of long ago in its greater attention to the 

 facts of Nature and its more rigid control over the 

 tendency to hypothesis ; although hypothesis remains, 

 and must ever remain, as the guide and inspirer of 

 observation and the discovery of fact.* Although 

 Darwin has kindled the imagination of hundreds of 

 workers, and has thus been the cause of an immense 

 amount of speculation, science owes him an even 

 larger debt for the innumerable facts discovered 

 under the guidance of this faculty. 



* See Professor Meldola's interesting Presidential Address to 

 the Entomological Society of London (January, 1896) on the use of 

 the imagination in science, printed in the Transactions of the Society 

 and in Nature. See also " The Advancement of Science " (London, 

 1890), in which Professor Lankester maintains (p. 4): "All true 

 science deals with speculation and hypothesis, and acknowledges as 

 its most valued servant its indispensable ally and helpmeet that 

 which our German friends call ' Phantasie ' and we ' the Imagina- 

 tion.' " Consult also Professor Tyndall's essay " On the Scientific Use 

 of the Imagination" ("Fragments of Science," 1889, vol. ii., p. 101). 



