574 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLVII. No. 1224 



Joining hands in the gloom, a league from the 

 last of the sun. 

 Hush! Men talk to-day o'er the waste of the ulti- 

 mate slime, 



And a new Word runs between: whispering, 

 ' ' Let us be one I ' ' 



Is there not food for imagination in the 

 phenomenon of the wireless message? A 

 few years ago I spent a summer at the 

 Puget Sound Marine Station. On a hill 

 behind us was a wireless establishment to 

 which we sometimes tramped for a chat 

 with the operators. One day we were told 

 with pride they had just picked up a com- 

 munication from Key "West, the longest 

 distance from which that station had ever 

 received a message. "We below the hill had 

 known nothing of this. ""Warning, sorrow 

 and gain, salutation and mirth" had 

 passed over our heads on the wings of the 

 air, and the telling of their passage was a 

 revelation of things in the universe of 

 which man knoweth naught, but which are 

 not unknowable. To my mind we have 

 gained more with the advance of science 

 than we have lost; and imagination need 

 not go unfed, when out of the fog, the night 

 and the distance, as though from another 

 world, comes that which signals ' ' Save our 

 Ship," to listening ears a thousand miles 

 away on sea and shore. 



3. SCIENCE AND ESTHETIC APPRECLA.TION 



Esthetic appreciation may seem as dis- 

 tant from science as are the poles from one 

 another. Yet if we analyze the case, our 

 esthetic response becomes, when stripped 

 of what is non-essential, an intellectual 

 rather than a sensual pleasure. The ' ' good, 

 the beautiful and the true," as we see it, 

 is largely that to which we are accustomed, 

 whether it be a brand of perfume, a style 

 in skirts or a scientific theory. Also its 

 cost, as Professor Veblin^ shows, is an in- 



* Veblin, T., ' ' The Theory of the Leisure CQass, ' ' 

 Macmillan Co., 1912. 



fluential factor. Personally, I hold to the 

 faith that there are such things as the 

 beautiful and the ugly, that it is not all a 

 matter of that to which one is accustomed, 

 only I often doubt whether any of us know 

 what's what. "Within the purely intellec- 

 tual realm, however, we are on safer since 

 more common ground. For example, the 

 satisfaction one has in the demonstrated 

 theorem or in the chain of evidence when 

 the last link is forged, is an esthetic satis- 

 faction. There is the same feeling of com- 

 pleteness as in beholding the creation of 

 artist or sculptor from which nothing could 

 be taken away or nothing added without 

 marring its perfection. Say that we ap- 

 preciate such things merely because our 

 minds run in certain channels. The fact 

 remains that our minds so run, and that as 

 long as human minds continue to be what 

 they are we may expect them to follow sim- 

 ilar courses. Stories are told of great 

 minds completing their scientific discover- 

 ies in a state bordering on religious ex- 

 haltation, but many of us have felt the 

 same thrill even though the work were not 

 our own. The writer remembers how when 

 a student he was taken by the "Mosquito- 

 malaria Theory," as it was then called; 

 and at a later date the esthetic apprecia- 

 tion with which he contemplated the ap- 

 parent explanation of Mendelian segrega- 

 tion and of the determination of sex in 

 terms of the behavior of chromosomes. In 

 spite of uncertainties and the need for 

 further investigation, one felt himself gaz- 

 ing at a picture near enough completion to 

 show what it might become — a sequence so 

 wonderfully ordered as to call forth an es- 

 thetic fervor. To many of us, therefore, 

 scientific thinking and the contemplation of 

 the theories of science present an esthetic 

 appeal of the first order. 



