Mabch-21, 19U:2 ] 



SCIENCE. 



473 



meanings, is to invite obscurity and misunder- 

 standing. 



The unscientific mind may not always appre- 

 ciate llie requirements of classification as an 

 important aid to scientific development. To 

 one who is not a geologist nor an agriculturist, 

 a clod of earth may be sufficiently described 

 by a word of three letters. It is mud, and 

 there is nothing more to be said about it. 

 But the man who has learned to use his eyes 

 (and one need not have a college education to 

 do that) perceives that there may be fifty dif- 

 ferent kinds of mud; and the scientist who 

 wishes to investigate the subject of soils and 

 the rocks from which they are made, recog- 

 nizes the necessity of an exact and elaborate 

 nomenclature. 



This need comes, in the first place, from the 

 use of terms as mere tools for facilitating 

 analysis, and thus favoring the development 

 of a research. In this sense, that is to say, 

 as provisory terms, invented by the investiga- 

 tor for the purpose of mapping put and 

 arranging his work in an orderly way, it is 

 desirable that the vocabulary shall be so full 

 that it may seldom or never be necessary to use 

 names with a double significance. Not all of 

 these names will be retained eventually, but 

 the looker-on must learn to tolerate them, at 

 least during the incipient stage of path-find- 

 ing investigation. 



In the next place, entirely new branches of 

 knowledge require the invention of whole 

 classes of terms, constituting virtually a new 

 language. To dissent from this position, and 

 to require that the new thoughts shall be 

 clothed in familiar forms, is as unreasonable 

 as to require that the proposition of the maxi- 

 mum economy of material in the construction 

 of the bee's cell shall be demonstrated without 

 the use of the differential calculus, or that all 

 psychological propositions shall be stated in 

 terms of one sense, that of sight. 



The final forms which shall be given to 

 words expressing necessary and permanently 

 useful distinctions of meaning are a matter 

 which may well concern all scientific workers, 

 whatever their specialties, as well as the gen- 

 eral public. It is of course desirable that a 

 new word shall be short, if this desideratum 



is compatible with intelligibility. Unfortu- 

 nately, most of the short-cuts which are pro- 

 posed from time to time, such as sweeping 

 reforms of an extensive and tremendously cum- 

 bersome chemical nomenclature by substitut- 

 ing words of one syllable, break down under a 

 weight of meaningless memorizing which is 

 absolutely prohibitive. Common names of 

 Ijlants and animals become overloaded with so 

 many meanings in different localities as to 

 be equally useless. The prevalent custom of 

 inventing names by joining Greek or Latin 

 words of cognate import, giving to the new 

 term a special and new significance, has the 

 advantage that the word-coinage is, to a 

 degree, self-explanatory, at least to one who 

 has learned a modicum of Greek and Latin 

 words. There is no royal road to knowledge. 

 Scientific descriptions remain unintelligible to 

 the lazy man who hates to use the dictionary. 

 They are free property to all who are willing 

 to take this trouble. 



Frank W. Very. 



ENGINEEBINO- NOTES. 



INDUSTRIAL ECONOMICS. 



An interesting and probably important 

 fact, and one which may ultimately have a 

 serious influence upon the relative standing, 

 industrially, of the United States and Great 

 Britain, is reported by English papers. It 

 is the signature of an agreement between the 

 employers and workmen in the machine shops 

 of Great Britain which, on the whole, would 

 seem entirely reasonable, while in the United 

 States the unions have refused to enter into 

 a similarly reasonable arrangement. The ini- 

 tiation of the displacement of British manu- 

 facturers from their own markets and from 

 the markets of the world was largely due to 

 the restriction of production and the depriva- 

 tion of free workmen of the privilege of work- 

 ing at their trades, while, in our own coun- 

 try, restriction of production was almost 

 unknown and freedom of the individual was 

 at least not absolutely destroyed. It now looks 

 possible that the conditions may be reversed. 



The British agreement provides that the 

 unions shall not interfere with business man- 

 agement, nor the employers with the proper 



