470 
To the searcher for truth for truth’s sake it 
has been for many years both amusing and 
irritating to observe the manner in which even 
in scientific circles Teutonic megalomania has 
been growing by leaps and bounds. German 
conceit, originally engendered by the easy vic- 
tory over France in the Franco-Prussian War, 
and fostered by subsequent German commercial 
success and prosperity, spread rapidly from 
political and military circles into the ranks of 
scientific investigators. A gullible world, 
easily duped, accepted the pretensions of these 
alleged “supermen,” not only in the fields of 
war and mercantile industry, but also in the 
fields of science. The uninformed and unre- 
flecting attributed to German sitzfleisch the- 
honors which belong to esprit, mistaking as- 
siduity for genius. Perhaps the most wofully 
deceived person was the German himself, who, 
contemplating the results of his compilatory 
labors, exclaimed after the manner of little 
Jack Horner “ What a Big Boy am I!” 
The writer of this note is to a certain ex- 
tent in sympathy with his two learned friends, 
Hampson and Walsingham, and at future in- 
ternational congresses is prepared to vote heart- 
ily, should they make the motion, for the ex- 
elusion of the “ Berliner Geck” from gather- 
ings in which said “ Geck” may rise and at- 
tempt to air himself and his opinions. He 
has, however, a conviction that in future as- 
semblages of this sort there will be less mani- 
festation of the Prussian spirit than there 
has been in the recent past. Events are so 
shaping themselves that our friends, “the 
supermen,” will be inclined to take a position 
more nearly in accord with the facts of the 
universe in which they and we live. 
The writer, however, can not unqualifiedly 
give in his adhesion to the proposal to ignore 
the work of Teuton naturalists unless pub- 
lished in English or French. While it is true 
that the value of the work done by Germans 
in many fields has been ridiculously overesti- 
mated, nevertheless there is a certain body of 
men in Germany—aunless they have been shot 
off in recent battles—whose work is worthy 
of respect. These men naturally write in Ger- 
man. It is their mother tongue, and there are, 
SCIENCE 
[N. 8. Vou. XLVIII. No. 1245 
or used to be, a host of periodicals open to 
them. If by chance some of them should erect 
a genus, or describe a species having validity, 
according to the inexorable “law of priority ” 
the names given by them will have to stand in 
the future literature of science, and it will 
not mend matters to pass resolutions declaring 
that only papers published in English and 
French shall be taken into consideration by 
systematic workers. This war is not going to 
last forever. We hope that Prussian militar- 
ism and despotism will vanish from the world, 
as other nightmares have vanished in the past. 
We trust that a full atonement for political 
and military crimes will be exacted. We ex- 
pect that sanity will return after a while to 
German crania, and that megacephalic symp- 
toms (they eall the disease “big-head” in 
Kentucky) will abate, and that peace will re- 
turn to this war-worn world. When that time 
comes, we will have, to quote Lord Walsing- 
ham himself, “to trace out the literary history 
of each species, and to preserve for it the 
name bestowed by the first author who de- 
scribed or figured it.” I+ will then not matter 
whether he was English, French, American, 
Japanese, or German. It will be, just as it has 
been in the past, a matter of purely historico- 
scientific interest. English men of science rec- 
ognize to-day the scientific names given by 
Frenchmen who applied them at a time when 
England was at war with France. English 
men of science and American men of science 
will do the same thing in the case of names 
given by Germans with whose despotic and 
autocratic powers we are now at war. 
The writer loathes despotism and conceit 
and ignorance and cruelty. The loathing he 
feels for these things, however, does not blind 
him to the eternal verities. The essence of 
science is truth. He can not conceive how 
scientific truth can be advanced by a resolu- 
tion that its utterance shall be confined to the 
English and French languages, though he pre- 
fers these languages to German and Choctaw. 
The adoption of the proposal made by Lord 
Walsingham would conduce to that state of 
affairs which he reprobates in the case of 
Staudinger & Wocke’s “Catalogue.” Science 
