14 REPORT—1899. 
We may say this, but we must say it without boasting. For the very 
story of the past which tells of the triumphs of science bids the man of 
science put away from him all thoughts of vainglory. And that by many 
tokens. 
Whoever, working at any scientific problem, has occasion to study the 
inquiries into the same problem made by some fellow-worker in the years 
long gone by, comes away from that study humbled by one or other of 
two different thoughts. On the one hand he may find, when he has 
translated the language of the past into the phraseology of to-day, how 
near was his forerunner of old to the conception which he thought, with 
pride, was all his own, not only so true but so new. On the other hand, 
if the ideas of the investigator of old, viewed in the light of modern know- 
ledge, are found to be so wide of the mark as to seem absurd, the smile 
which begins to play upon the lips of the modern is checked by the thought, 
Will the ideas which I am now putting forth, and which I think explain 
so clearly, so fully, the problem in hand, seem to some worker in the far 
future as wrong and as fantastic as do these of my forerunner tome? In 
either case his personal pride is checked. Further, there is written clearly 
on each page of the history of science, in characters which cannot be 
overlooked, the lesson that no scientific truth is born anew, coming by 
itself and of itself. Each new truth is always the offspring of something 
which has gone before, becoming in turn the parent of something 
coming after. In this aspect the man of science is unlike, or seems to be 
unlike, the poet and the artist. The poet is born, not made : he rises up, 
no man knowing his beginnings ; when he goes away, though men after 
him may sing his songs for centuries, he himself goes away wholly, having 
taken with him his mantle, for this he can give to none other. The man 
of science is not thus creative ; he is created. His work, however great it 
be, is not wholly his own ; it is in part the outcome of the work of men 
who have gone before. Again and again a conception which has made 
a name great has come not so much by the man’s own effort as out of the 
fulness of time. Again and again we may read in the words of some man 
of old the outlines of an idea which in later days has shone forth as a great 
acknowledged truth. From the mouth of the man of old the idea dropped 
barren, fruitless ; the world was not ready for it, and heeded it not; the 
concomitant and abutting truths which could give it power to work were 
wanting. Coming back again in later days, the same idea found the world 
awaiting it ; things were in travail preparing for it ; and someone, seizing 
the right moment to put it forth again, leapt into fame. It isnot so much 
the men of science who make science, as some spirit which, born of the 
truths already won, drives the man of science onward and uses him to 
win new truths in turn. 
It is because each man of science is not his own master, but one of 
many obedient servants of an impulse which was at work long before him, 
and will work long after him, that in science there is no falling back. In 
