FROM BUFF ON TO DARWIN. 323 



literature of science. Professor Flinders Petrie lately used a 

 memorable expression, that this age is drunk with writing. 

 Anyone who has tried to light a fire will know that when too 

 much paper is used in the kindling, the flame is extinguished by 

 its own smoke. From these metaphors you may understand the 

 risk to which scientific truth is exposed of being disabled and 

 smothered by the multitude of its exponents. Observations 

 must be recorded. Writers can only attain efficiency by reiterated 

 efforts. But it is not necessary that every beginner's essays, 

 every crude attempt at research, every uncompleted investigation, 

 every reproduction of the obvious and the commonplace, should 

 be printed and published. Those who are engaged in bibliography, 

 classification, and monographic work of every kind, however free 

 they may be from critical cynicism, cannot close their eyes to 

 the difference of merit in the writers whose works they are 

 obliged to examine. The difference often ranges from supreme 

 excellence to detestable badness. By publishing what is old as 

 though it were new ; by incomplete, inaccurate, confused and 

 misleading descriptions of what is really new; by hypotheses 

 based on easily avoidable ignorance, authors win themselves no 

 honour, and they grievously trouble science. Those, too, do an 

 injury to themselves and their neighbours who, out of careless- 

 ness, or out of self-will, or out of superfluous modesty, use 

 irregular, unrecognised, and obscure means of publication for 

 discoveries that are valuable and good. 



Our Union will have justified its existence if it can persuade 

 its members and all who come within the sphere of its influence 

 to put mischief and destructiveness out of countenance, to dis- 

 courage the diffusion of useless knowledge, to bring loyal effort 

 and arduous exertion in the service of truth into prominence and 

 the full light of day. 



More I shall forbear to tell you anent the wisdom and the 

 profit of all that we wish to do and to do not ; remembering how 

 even the eager and enquiring Queen of Sheba, on her visit to the 

 Hebrew Linnaeus, was so tired out with all that she heard and 

 saw that there was no more spirit in her. Only to timid and 

 hesitating beginners I may venture to say one concluding word. 

 Believe me, that ever as you pursue your path through the fairy- 

 land of science, and become more and more acquainted with the 



