428 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION B. 
new relations, new circumstances, with the object of getting new results. The 
stronger the imaginative power the greater must be the chance of success. The 
‘Times,’ in a recent leading article on Science and Imagination, says: ‘It has 
often been said that the great scientific discoverers . . . see a new truth before 
they prove it, and the process of proof is only a demonstration of the truth to 
others and a confirmation of it to their own reason.’ While never forgetting 
the essentially tentative nature of a hypothesis, still, until it has been tested 
and found wanting, there should be some confidence or faith in its truthfulness ; 
for nothing but a belief in its eventual success can serve to sustain an inquirer’s 
ardour when, as so often happens, he is met by difficulties well-nigh insuperable. 
In a well-known passage Faraday says: ‘The world little knows how many of the 
thoughts and theories which have passed through the mind of a scientific investi- 
gator have been crushed in silence and secrecy by his own severe criticism 
and adverse examination; that in the most successful instances not a tenth of 
the suggestions, the hopes, the wishes, the preliminary conclusions have been 
realised.’ 
But a hypothesis to be useful, to be admitted as a candidate for rank as a 
scientific theory, must be capable of immediate, or at least of possible, verification. 
Many years ago, in the old Berlin laboratory in the Georgenstrasse, when our 
imaginations were wont, as sometimes happened, to soar too far above the 
working benches, our great leader used to say: ‘1 will listen readily to any 
suggested hypothesis, but on one condition—that you show me a method by 
which it can be tested.’ Asa rule, I confess we had to return to the workaday 
world, to our bench experiments. No one felt the importance of the careful 
and correct employment of hypotheses more than Liebig. In his Faraday 
lecture Hofmann says of Liebig: ‘If he finds his speculation to be in contra- 
diction with recognised facts, he endeavours to set these facts aside by new 
experiments, and failing to do so he drops the speculation.’ Again, he gives 
an illustration of how on one occasion, not being able to divest himself of a 
hypothesis, he missed the discovery of the element bromine. While at Kreuznach 
he made an investigation of the mother-liquor of the well-known salt, and 
obtained a considerable quantity of a heavy red liquid which he believed to 
be a chloride of iodine. ‘He found the properties to be different in many respects 
from chloride of iodine; still, he was able to satisfy all his doubts, and he 
put the liquid aside. Some months later he received Balard’s paper announcing 
the discovery of bromine, which he recognised at once as the red liquid which 
he had previously prepared and studied. Thus, though imagination is indis- 
pensable to a chemist, and though I think chemists should be, and let us hope 
are, poets, or at least possess the poetic temperament, still, little can be achieved 
without a thorough laboratory training; and he who discovers an improved 
experimental method or a new differentiating reaction is as surely contributing to 
the advancement of science as he who creates in his imagination the most 
beautiful and promising hypothesis. 
It may never be possible to trace in civilisation’s early records the exact 
period and place of the origin and beginnings of our science, but the historical 
student has been led, it appears to me, by a sure instinct to search for this 
in such lands of imaginative story as ancient Egypt and Arabia. For is there 
anything more fittingly comparable with the marvellous experiences of a chemical 
laboratory than the wonderful and fascinating stories that have come down to 
us in ‘The Arabian Nights’? Those monuments of poetical building of which 
Burton, in the introduction to his great translation, says that in times of official 
exile in less-favoured lands, in the wilds of Africa and America, he was lifted 
in imagination by the jinn out of his dull surroundings, and was borne off by 
him to his beloved Arabia, where under diaphanous skies he would see again 
‘the evening star hanging like a golden lamp from the pure front of the western 
firmament; the after-glow transfiguring and transforming as by magic the 
gazelle-brown and tawny-clay tints and the homely and rugged features of the 
scene into a fairyland lit with a light which never shines on other soils or 
seas. Then would appear, &c.’ I cannot help thinking that the study of such 
books as this, the habit of exercising the imagination by reconstructing the 
scenes of beauty and enchantment which they describe, might do much to 
strengthen and sharpen the imaginative faculty, and greatly increase its efficiency 
