A Century of Science 21 



spider and every lobster is made up of just twenty 

 segments ? Is it not enough to know the fact ? 

 Children must not ask too many questions. It is 

 the business of science to gather facts, not to seek 

 for hidden implications. Such was the mental at- 

 titude into which men of science were quite com- 

 monly driven, between 1830 and 1860, by their de- 

 sire to blink the question of evolution. A feeling 

 grew up that the true glory of a scientific career was 

 to detect for the two hundredth time an asteroid, 

 or to stick a pin through a beetle with a label at- 

 tached bearing your own latinized name, Browni, 

 or Jonesii, or Robinsoniense. This feeling was 

 especially strong in France, and was not confined 

 to physical science. It was exhibited a few years 

 later in the election of some Swedish or Norwegian 

 naturalist (whose name I forget) to the French 

 Academy of Science instead of Charles Darwin : 

 the former had described some new kind of fly, 

 the latter was only a theorizer! The study of 

 origins in particular was to be frowned upon. In 

 1863 the Linguistic Society of Paris passed a by- 

 law that no communications bearing upon the ori- 

 gin of language would be received. In the same 

 mood, Sir Henry Maine's treatise on "Ancient Law " 

 was condemned at a leading American university : 

 it was enough for us to know our own laws ; those 



