May 21, 190S] 



SCIENCE 



819 



peets of the world from their context, which 

 none the less really conditions them; the con- 

 clusions, therefore, of any science become, if 

 generalized and made applicable to the whole, 

 not only inadequate but self-contradictory. 

 (2) Likewise, if the generalized results of 

 science conflict with ideal interests they stul- 

 tify themselves ; for the abstraction from which 

 they arose was for the sake of an ideal. Whil«r 

 the reviewer sympathizes with much in Pro- 

 fessor Wenley's doctrine, he does not think 

 these arguments calculated to convince. (1) 

 To say that the conclusions reached primarily 

 by segregating and analyzing a certain aspect 

 or type of phenomena are necessarily inap- 

 plicable and absurd beyond the limits of that 

 segregation, is to say that no unification of 

 knowledge is possible at all. Science assumes 

 that phenomena seemingly complex and diverse 

 can ultimately be understood as special varia- 

 tions — under conditions also generalizable — 

 of a simple and homogeneous type-phenom- 

 enon, or of a few such. This assumption is 

 very possibly unwarranted ; but it is not comic, 

 and it is not to be disposed of by so easy a 

 piece of dialectic as that employed by the 

 author. (2) Many principles of science are 

 undoubtedly postulated ideal demands. There 

 is no necessary paradox in the opposition of 

 these intellectual ideals to ideals of another 

 order and origin. The question — ^which this 

 book does not very explicitly discuss — is: 

 When they conflict, which has the right of 

 way? 



One could wish that Professor Wenley would 

 be persuaded to chasten his style. At its best 

 it is admirably vigorous and effective; but 

 there are moments in which it seems a cross 

 between the style of the Delphian oracle and 

 that of Mr. George Ade. In such passages 

 the simple, precise and natural expression is 

 laboriously avoided in the interest of strange 

 archaisms and neologisms and a general 

 grandiloquent incomprehensibility. Thus the 

 reader is told that " a mystic element is the 

 leit motiv of the fiducial process " ; what he 

 is expected to gather is uncertain, but the 

 reference at any rate is not to the religious 

 propensities of bankers. One learns of " the 

 SBonic means whereby acute need for God is 



brought home to the secular group"; one is 

 warned that " while it would be sheer ingrati- 

 tude to lightlie these [historical] investiga- 

 tions, it is quite another affair to train with 

 their representatives when," etc. ; one is assured 

 that " God is the normative content of human 

 life " ; and one makes the acquaintance of such 

 supernumeraries of our speech as " to gift a 

 procedure " (meaning, simply, to give a pro- 

 cedure), "derivant" (for derivative), "a 

 quantitative phantasmagoria," " misfortunate- 

 ly," " his near kith." 



Arthur O. Lovejoy 

 The Univebsity of Missouri 



ON TEE NATURE AND POSSIBLE ORIGIN 

 OP THE MILKY WAT"- 

 While the milky way has long been recog- 

 nized as a relatively thin segment of space in 

 which stars appear more nxmaerous than else- 

 where, no satisfactory explanation has been 

 offered for the existence of such a segment 

 with the earth apparently at its center or for 

 any of its characteristic peculiarities of aspect 

 and relationship to the stars as a whole. Note- 

 worthy among the features calling for ex- 

 planation are the following: The milky way 

 is a belt approximately following a great 

 circle of the sky but broad and diffuse through- 

 out one haK of its course while relatively nar- 

 row and well defined on the opposite side. 

 The broad half of the belt is cleft in two by a 

 dark lane running along its axis and in addi- 

 tion contains numerous rifts and holes from 

 which the narrow half is relatively free. The 

 mrnaber of stars per unit area of the sky is a 

 maximum in the milky way and diminishes 

 progressively on either hand, while the inverse 

 relation is true for the nebulae, their frequency 

 increasing with increasing distance from the 

 milky way. 



It is shown in the present paper that all 

 these peculiarities are immediate results of the 

 supposition that the visible universe consists 

 in the main of two distinct but interpene- 

 trating parts, the first of which is a chaos of 

 indefinite extent in which stars and cosmic 

 "^Abstract of paper read at the April meeting of 

 the National Academy of Sciences by George C. 

 Comstoek. 



