INTRODUCTION 27 



lated of Newton, for instance, that, although he survived 

 for forty years the publication of his great work, The 

 Principia, he did not have upwards of twenty followers in 

 all England at the time of his death, and that it was not 

 until ten years later that his doctrines were allowed to be 

 taught at Cambridge and Oxford in competition with 

 those of Descartes ! Truly, a prophet is often without 

 honor in his own generation as well as in his own country. 

 temporal mores! To-day Newton's fame fills the 

 world, and a new generation has arisen that honors his 

 opinions above Nature's truths, and even counts it a 

 virtue to shield his errors against exposure and correc- 

 tion ! 



The generality of mankind appear to labor under 

 the fond delusion that in the serene domain of pure 

 science are to be found all the noblest scientific virtues in 

 their highest perfection receptivity, open-niindedness, 

 frankness, catholicity, intellectual hospitality, and the 

 like. In view of the pitiful failures they have scored all 

 along the line, and which I have just outlined, we should 

 especially expect of Newtonians a generous share of that 

 divine humility which their renowned leader displayed 

 when he uttered those memorable words: "I know not 

 what the world will think of my labors, but to myself it 

 seems that I have been but as a child playing on the sea- 

 shore; now finding some pebble rather more polished, 

 and now some shell rather more agreeably variegated 

 than another, while the immense ocean of truth extended 

 itself unexplored before me." But contrast with this 

 sentiment the following passage from the pen of the dis- 

 tinguished Director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical 

 Observatory at Washington, Doctor Charles G. Abbot. 

 In his learned work, The Sun (p. 8), he says : 



Every large scientific institution or observatory has almost 

 daily communications from persons of very moderate attainments 

 who presume to question, nay rather to spurn, the most well-at- 

 tested facts of human knowledge. Such persons seem to prefer 

 especially to direct their attacks on the following facts: the 

 Copernican system ; the law of universal gravitation ; the first and 

 second laws of energy; and, finally, the high temperature of the 



