October 25, 1895.] 



SCIENCE. 



555 



immense majority of scientific workers, and the 

 few materialists wlio presume to spealt in the 

 name of their scientific brethren have no brief 

 so to represent them. The cool assumption that 

 biologic science is coterminous with physics is 

 difficult to correctly characterize — politely. The 

 refutation of that dogma has been made a hun- 

 dred times and no adequate answer to these 

 refutations has ever been made. Take one of 

 these refutations, Beale's Protoplasm; no dis- 

 passionate and logical mind, knowing aught of 

 the history of science or the laws of logic, can 

 deny that the arguments and facts there set 

 forth leave the dogmas of scientific materialism 

 smashed to utter and everlasting smithereens. 



An amusing corollary of the scientific dog- 

 matists is that ' ' consciousness and volition can- 

 not cause structure or anything else," and that 

 function is always the result of structure. This 

 is, of course, necessary to the materialistic 

 dogma, but ' ' it can be stated without fear of 

 refutation" that no one, not even Professor 

 Brooks, ever observed a single fact of physi- 

 ology, plant or animal, in which function did 

 not precede structure, and surely before he 

 could write his denial his ' consciousness and 

 volition ' set to work the machinery that moved 

 his pen. Are the pseudopods of the amo3ba 

 ' structures?' Did not the function of amoeboid 

 locomotion precede the locomotion of truly 

 structural organs, such as feet and fins? Did 

 not the desire for movement precede amceboid 

 movement? Did not the desire create the 

 structureless pseudopods ? If function is always 

 the result of structure, what then created the 

 structures, e. g., the million structures of the 

 unborn fetus ? The logic of the situation is that 

 as ' consciousness and volition ' have no organs, 

 so far as any scientist knows, of which they are 

 the outcome, it follows that consciousness and 

 volition are only ' the empty shadow of changes 

 that go on in the physical basis' — i. e., they do 

 not exist. If the facts do not tally with our 

 theory so much the worse for the facts — let's 

 flatly deny them existence. Of 'beliefs held 

 because they cannot be disproved,' the most 

 perfect of illustrators are surely those children 

 in science who dogmatically wage Quixotic war- 

 fare against dogmatism. 



Of the many charming self-contradictions of 



Professor Brooks' delightful letter that I should 

 like to mention, none is more suggestive than his 

 ' demand ' that we accept as our sole scientific 

 creed the desire to find out " whether life is or 

 is not different from matter," and "whether 

 thought is or is not an agent, ' ' and yet the be- 

 ginning, middle and end of his entire letter is, 

 one might say, soaked in the dogma, determined 

 in advance, that there is no ' whether ' at all, 

 and that it ' is flatly contradicted by most in- 

 vestigators.' His contempt for those who still 

 entei'tain the ' whether ' is, — to put it most 

 courteously — the limit of childish naivete. 



George M. Gould. 

 Philadelphia, October 15, 1895. 



THE INVERTED IMAGE ON THE RETINA AGAIN. 



Professor Brooks' statement concerning the 

 inverted image on the retina, in a late number 

 of Science, has called to my mind an experi- 

 ment in optics which I stumbled upon as a boy 

 one Sunday night in church when the sermon 

 had extended beyond my powers of listening. 

 As I have not seen an account of the experi- 

 ment in the usual statements regarding the dem- 

 onstration of the inverted image on the retina, 

 I venture to give the matter for whatever it 

 may be worth. 



My attention having been attracted by the 

 ' beams ' of light which seemed to shoot off to- 

 wards the ceiling and toward the floor from one 

 of the gas jets of a chandelier, I aimlessly 

 pushed against the under eyelid with my 

 finger, and was surprised to see one of the beams 

 of light, the upper one, shorten and lengthen, 

 according to whether I opened or shut the 

 lower lid. On repeating the experiment with 

 the upper lid, I obtained the same results on the 

 beam which appeared to pass downivard from 

 the gas jet. By closing one eye and carefully 

 squinting with the other at the distant gas jet 

 and working my eyelids in the manner above 

 described, it was at once evident that the outer 

 termini of these beams were cut squarely off, 

 and that the end farthest from the gas light 

 was in some way by refraction hinged to the 

 edge of my eyelid. In short, as these red 

 ' rays ' formed part of the opposite sides of a 

 cone, with the gas light at their apex, and the 

 base at the contact of the edge of my eyelids 



