Decembek 27, 1907] 



SCIENCE 



909 



QUOTATIONS 



POPULAR science' 



In the December number of The Popular 

 Science Monthly Dr. William Morton Wheeler, 

 of the American Museum of Natural History, 

 has an. article on " The Origin of Slavery 

 among Ants." Such a jumble of sesquipe- 

 dalian words and false analogies it would be 

 difficult to find even inside the covers of a 

 work on physiological psychology. We shall 

 quote some sentences taken almost haphazard 

 as specimens of the turgid nonsense so pomp- 

 ously pieced together by this pretentious 

 sciolist. He writes on the most nebulous 

 questions with an air of dogmatic infallibility 

 which he himself would resent in a decree of 

 Pius X. He is a type of a class of men 

 rapidly growing in the United States, shallow- 

 brained and half-educated, and intoxicated 

 with the exuberance of their own barbarous 

 phraseology. 



Lest we should leave ourselves open to the 

 suspicion of unfair criticism we shall give 

 illustrations of this fellow's ridiculous jargon. 

 As will be easily seen no Irish hedge school- 

 master discussing Virgil's birth in a port- 

 manteau in the pages of Carleton's romances 

 ever did perpetrate more puerile attempts to 

 parade an aggregation of inane verbosity. 

 " Slavery or dulosis," he tells us in the open- 

 ing sentence of his second paragraph, " is a 

 rare phenomenon among ants." What was 

 the motive for introducing the word dulosis? 

 It is derived from doulos, the Greek word for 

 slave, and means precisely the same thing as 

 slavery. Was it introduced to show that the 



' This comment on the work of one of the most 

 distinguished American naturalists exploits a 

 point of view which readers of Science probably 

 regard as obsolete. The editorial article is imme- 

 diately preceded by an autograph letter, which, 

 as translated, reads: "To our beloved children, 

 the writers and readers of The New World, pub- 

 lished in Chicago, under the auspices of the Most 

 Reverend Archbishop of that city: — We impart 

 with cordial affection our apostolic benediction 

 and invoke for them every good and salutary gift 

 in the Lord. From the Palace of the Vatican, 

 6th day of April, 1907.— Pius X., Pontifex 

 Maximxis." 



author had some knowledge of Greek, or was 

 it interposed to clarify his meaning and make 

 science popular? „ Onine ignotum pro mag- 

 nifico. Many persons are so constituted that 

 they worship the unknown and " It's all Greek 

 to me>" has come to be synonymous with 

 ignorance. In this way Wheeler throws dust 

 in his reader's eyes and conceals the scantiness 

 of his knowledge. 



Here is another example of a vacuum filled 

 up by a compound Greek word : " An emi- 

 nently predatory species thus comes to live 

 in intimate symbiosis with workers of an alien 

 species which are said to function as slaves 

 or auxiliaries." Symbiosis is derived from 

 the Greek preposition syn, meaning together, 

 and the word hios, meaning life. The writer's 

 idea is that these predatory species live in 

 communities, or in common. But in order 

 to inject a Greek word, parade his erudi- 

 tion, and confound the reader he has recourse 

 to a barbarous circumlocution, an absurd 

 tautology which when literally translated 

 into ordinary language reads : " An emi- 

 nently predatory species thus comes to live in 

 intimate common living," etc. The two pas- 

 sages examined are taken from the same para- 

 graph. Immediately afterwards we stumble 

 on the literary gem : " The colony grows apace, 

 the workers increasing in number, size and 

 polymorphism with successive broods." Sim- 

 ilar vaporings meet the vision at every stage 

 of the article. 



Wheeler is a blatant bigot, a hater of 

 Christianity, a man who out-Herods Herod 

 and out-Haeckels Haeckel. He dwells with 

 pride on his monkey ancesti-y and he is not 

 without many of the apish instincts of the 

 ourang-outang. Animalism as opposed to 

 intellectualism is his philosophy. He has 

 long dwelt among stuffed mastodons and ich- 

 thyosauri, and his mind, dwarfed by his en- 

 vironment, has no higher ideal than an ant- 

 heap or a skeleton. If he undertakes to ex- 

 plain the highest spiritual attainments of man 

 or to interpret the most complex forms of 

 social organization he goes for light to the 

 hEenatocoecus or to the mosquito. Logic is 

 utterly discarded by him. He knows as much 

 about the laws of dialectics as, to use Luther's 



