INTRODUCTION 25 



THE ELUSIVENESS OF THE OBVIOUS 



To my mind, the most striking mental peculiarity of 

 mankind in the past has been its proneness, in all ages, to 

 focus attention on the things at a distance rather than on 

 those close at hand, to prefer the abstruse to the simple, 

 the miraculous to the natural, the obscure to the obvious. 

 In fact, the epochal events in the life of Astronomy have 

 all been spectacular revelations of truths that ought to 

 have been almost intuitively perceived. The conspicuous 

 discs of the sun and moon, for instance, and the rounded 

 outline of the earth's shadow thrown upon the latter in 

 eclipses, are phenomena too plain, one would suppose, for 

 even a thoughtful boy to misinterpret. How, again, men 

 in their sanity could for fourteen centuries on end as did 

 the Ptolemaists prefer to believe and to teach that the 

 vast heavens rotate daily around our little grain of dust, 

 instead of the latter turning upon its own axis, surpasses 

 our modern understanding. It took fifteen centuries, 

 from Ptolemy to Kepler, to evolve a mind capable of con- 

 ceiving the simple notion that circulating bodies the 

 moon and planets might turn around their primaries in 

 another kind of curve than a circle, and it took even the 

 great mind of Kepler a score of years of toilsome effort 

 to gestate the thought. And yet, again, not until a paltry 

 two centuries ago did a Newton arise to suggest and 

 prove that gravitation extends beyond our atmosphere. 

 It has been said of Bismarck that his success as a states- 

 man largely lay in frankly avowing his true motives, be- 

 cause he had observed that openness in a diplomat was 

 the last thing generally looked for, and hence was a better 

 cloak than any form of deceit could be. The reason the 

 obvious in Nature goes unrecognized so long is because 

 artful man misdoubts her plain message and in a spirit of 

 subtlety reads in a farrago of irrelevancies between the 

 lines. Lovers of Dickens will recall Mr. Pickwick's mo- 

 mentous antiquarian discovery, on the premises of one 

 Bill Stumps, of a stone bearing a curious legend out of 

 which Mr. Pickwick drew some twenty-seven recondite 

 meanings, when, as a matter of fact, according to the 



