334 SUMMARY OF CURRENT RESEARCHES RELATING TO 



It is of course very easy to prove anything if only we are 

 allowed to start with a prciuiss or definition of our own choosing. 

 If, for instance, a zoologist is held to be a man whose whole delight is 

 to arrange quadrupeds and birds on pieces of nicely polished wood, 

 with every hair of their bodies and every feather in their tails exactly 

 in place, how surely it follows that zoologists ought not to be allowed 

 to " hang-on " to the scientific army. If botanists are people whose 

 only object is to spread plants out flat on pieces of pai)er of elegant 

 design and with regard only to the prettiness of the arrangement, 

 botanists clearly ought to be shunned by all right-thinking persons. 

 The writer has apparently never heard of a class of men, of whom 

 Dr. Carpenter may be taken as a type, who are truly " microscopists," 

 and yet are not addicted to the vices of the imaginary beings who 

 figure in the above article. Nor does he seem to have ever heard of 

 another class, of whom Prof. Abbe may be taken as an illustration, 

 who are even still more typically " microscopists." 



But even if the writer were correct in his definition of a 

 microscopist, he is wholly wrong in the moral he attempts to draw 

 from it. 



"Why should a person be derided who purchases a Microscope 

 with the intention of using it for the same end as his neighbour uses 

 a stereoscope, viz, as a means of amusement or, as the French say, as 

 a " distraction " ? Every one would of course desire that all possessors 

 of a Microscope would devote themselves to working out one or 

 more of the innumerable problems that still remain to be solved, but 

 that furnishes no valid reason for insisting that no one shall use a 

 Microscope who is not pledged to a course of scientific investigation 

 on pain of being denounced as unfit for the society of decent people. 

 It would be just as logical to insist that no one should grow flowers 

 who did not examine them botanically, or that no one should buy or 

 look at pictures who has not mastered the principles of art. Our 

 artists are much too wise in their generation to denounce such 

 persons or to proclaim them "hangers-on," or to suggest that they 

 have had enough of them, that they are nearly at the limit of their 

 patience, or any such absurdities. Scientific societies largely profit 

 by the subscriptions and other support of the so-called " hangers- 

 on," and it is doing no good to science to attempt to shut them 

 out from participating in its pleasures by derision and insult, or 

 by trying to make the possessor of a Microscope feel that he is in 

 the same category as the keeper of an illicit still. Cceteris paribus, 

 the man who takes an interest in what the Microscope reveals is likely 

 to be a better man than one who does not, and the greater number of 

 such persons there are the more the ranks of actual workers will be 

 recruited. Moreover, it is in the case of the Microscope j^ar excellence 

 that " hangers-on " have secured so great an advantage in the instru- 

 ment for the benefit not of themselves only, but the world in general. 

 A notable instance of this — the case of objectives — is curiously enough 

 made the subject of (deserved) national glorification in another part 

 of the same paper. The increasing army of observers of micro- 

 organisms are already beginning thoroughly to appreciate how much 



