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OWEN’S POSITION IN 
were solidly and securely laid sixty years ago. In 
fact, the importance of the work done by that 
time cannot be over-estimated ; for, as Cuvier 
has somewhere said, whatever may become of 
hypotheses, the man who has made a permanent 
addition to our knowledge of facts, has rendered 
an imperishable service to science. Nevertheless, 
it is an equally profound truth, of which no one was 
more conscious than Cuvier himself, that the 
ascertainment of facts, in the narrowest sense of 
the word, and the methodical recording of such 
facts, though it is the beginning of scientific 
righteousness, is only the beginning. To reach 
the end, that which is common to groups of de- 
tails must be carefully sifted out and expressed in 
general projaositions ; and these, again, must be 
tentatively colligated by the guarded and re- 
strained play of the imagination, in the invention 
of hypotheses, susceptible of verification or nega- 
tion by further observation. 
The vulgar antithesis of fact and theory is 
founded on a misconception of the nature of 
scientific theory, which is, or ought to be, no more 
than the expression of fact in a general form. 
Whatever goes beyond such expression is hypo- 
thesis ; and hypotheses are not ends, but means. 
They should be regarded as instruments by 
which new lines of inquiry are indicated ; or by 
the aid of which a provisional coherency and 
intelligibility may be given to seemingly discon- 
