July 13, 1900.] 



SCIENCE. 



55 



I can easily fancy a distinct protest at 

 the violence that any such plan will do to 

 our present treatment of species, and a 

 further and greater protest against the pos- 

 sible modification of prior specific names in 

 the interest of uniformity. A contemplation 

 of the results of the current nomenclature 

 reform makes me share in the feeling which 

 could prompt such a protest, yet I venture 

 to believe that the conservatism which op- 

 posed and still opposes the relatively trivial 

 priority upheaval that was to have pro- 

 duced a uniformity in plant names that 

 some botanists are still anxiously awaiting, 

 rests upon qualities that are more likely to 

 favor than oppose a far greater and even 

 radical change in the way of naming plants, 

 when such a change shall have become nec- 

 essary as a matter of practical utility — as it 

 is likely to sooner than most of us suspect. 



One of the most serious tasks of the in- 

 vestigator of the twentieth century will be 

 the utilization of the knowledge resulting 

 from the work of his predecessors in the 

 field which he may select for his own ac- 

 tivity. The rapid increase in specialization 

 compels him to begin his own productive 

 studies at an advanced point, while the 

 mass of material and the array of facts over 

 and through which he must clamber before 

 reaching his own starting point constitutes 

 a growing handicap, against the beginner 

 and likely often to discourage him and not 

 infrequently to make him a loser from the 

 start in the race for recognition and fame, 

 but in his favor after he shall once have 

 left it to his followers. Very probably, 

 much that he has learned at the start will 

 have to be unlearned later and no doubt 

 might better not have been learned at all, 

 for it is an unpleasant fact that little 

 progress in any direction is made without 

 the aid and embodiment of theories and 

 hypotheses, many of which of necessity are 

 tentative and sooner or later prove to be 



wrong, and that few wrong hypotheses fail 

 to leave a long persistent trail of erroneous 

 reasoning and even of observation so badly 

 warped as to be absolutely misleading ; but 

 aside from what is faulty, there is being 

 brought together daily an overwhelming 

 mass of information of the greatest use, so 

 that everything must be tested step by step 

 as any piece of investigation proceeds, and 

 the faulty detected and rejected, while the 

 trustworthy is built into the foundation on 

 which the author's own conclusions are to 

 rest. 



No doubt after assimilating the principal 

 knowledge of the past, every original and 

 really productive worker would feel a sense 

 of relief if he could wipe out the records of 

 this knowledge. Their existence virtually 

 compels him to burden his own discussion 

 of the subject with an analysis, commen- 

 datory or critical, of all that has been said 

 of it by his predecessors, — failing in which, 

 he leaves to those who follow him the con- 

 clusion either that he has not considered 

 the facts and deductions of earlier students, 

 or that none exist. The presumptive value 

 of his own work must of necessity be greatly 

 weakened if the first opinion is held, and in 

 the other event he is likely to seem to pose 

 as a leader when to the discriminating eye 

 he is merely a follower. 



No small part of the diflBculty of reach- 

 ing the point where one's own additions to 

 science begin comes from the fact that the 

 work of those who have gone before him is 

 commonly fragmentary and disjointed. It 

 is a first principle in research that no ac- 

 curately observed fact is valueless, but its 

 value lies chiefly in its comparability with 

 other facts. As a rule, thought or observa- 

 tion on any subject stimulates the further 

 elaboration of that subject, by drawing at- 

 tention to minutiae which any observant 

 person may then note, though he might not 

 have thought of connecting them himself. 

 Science has been both advanced and re- 



