1887 SCIENCE AND PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC REALISM i6y 



A good deal of correspondence at this time with Sir 

 M. Foster relates to the examination of the Science and 

 Art Department. He was still Dean, it will be remembered, 

 of the Royal College of Science, and further kept up his 

 connection with the Department by acting in an honorary 

 capacity as Examiner, setting questions, but less and less 

 looking over papers, acting as the channel for official com- 

 munications, as when he writes (April 24), " I send you 

 some Department documents — nothing alarming, only more 

 worry for the Asst. Examiners, and that zve do not mind " ; 

 and finally signing the Report. But to do this after taking 

 so small a share in the actual work of examining, grew 

 more and more repugnant to him, till on October 12 he 

 writes : — 



I will read the Report and sign it if need be — though there 

 really must be some fresh arrangement. 



Of course I have entire confidence in your judgment about 

 the examination, but I have a mortal horror of putting my name 

 to things I do not know of my own knowledge. 



In addition to these occupations, he wrote a short paper 

 upon a fossil, Ceratochelys, which was read at the Royal 

 Society on March 31 ; while on April 7 he read at the 

 Linnean (Botany: vol. xxiv. pp. 101-124), his paper, "The 

 Gentians : Notes and Queries," which had sprung from his 

 holiday amusement at Arolla. 



Philosophy, however, claimed most of his energies. The 

 campaign begun in answer to the incursion of Mr. Lilly 

 was continued in the article " Science and Pseudo-Scientific 

 Realism " (Coll. Essays, v. 59-89) which appeared in the 

 Nineteenth Century for February 1887. The text for this 

 discourse was the report of a sermon by Canon Liddon, 

 in which that eminent preacher spoke of catastrophes as 

 the antithesis of physical law, yet possible inasmuch as a 

 " lower law " may be " suspended " by the " intervention 

 of a higher," a mode of reasoning which he applied to the 

 possibility of miracles such as that of Cana. 



The man of science was up in arms against this incar- 

 nation of abstract terms, and offered a solemn protest against 

 that modern recrudescence of ancient realism which speaks 



