44 
TRANSACTION'S OF THE TEXAS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 
them more intelligent things. For one of the most deeply implanted and 
strongest instincts of the human mind is the love of the marvelous. We 
naturally like to hear and tell some new or strange thing, and most peo¬ 
ple love to believe that such things are true, and there is an instinctive 
natural bias in almost all minds in favor of the startling, the strange and 
the preter-natural. To find the astonishing, the mysterious, the extraor¬ 
dinary, degraded to the commonplaces is being compelled to submit to 
the destruction and robbery of our most pleasing and thrilling illusions. 
Not only has science made deep inroads upon superstitious beliefs and 
trampled many of them remorselessly into the dust, but it is constantly 
waging a relentless war with mental forces which are still more stubborn 
and difficult to conquer. These may be characterized as the polemic 
tendencies of human nature. Most men are more or less prone to con¬ 
troversy, and in the heat of it are determined to secure a triumph over 
other disputants, whether it be a real or only 7 a seeming one—whether 
the opponent be convinced or merely silenced. In such contests a large 
proportion of men are quite reckless of the kind of arguments they use— 
if, indeed, they can be called arguments—and look only to the ends to 
be gained. Anything that may tend in their judgment to secure a vic¬ 
tory is to them a good and proper argument, no matter whether it be 
true or false, sound or unsound. Take for example a partisan news¬ 
paper or a stump orator in the heat of a political campaign. Here it is 
needless to go into particulars; I think you all understand me. Possibly a 
more extreme illustration may be seen in the so-called arguments of 
lawyers before a jury 7 , in which every principle and every canon of sound 
reasoning is ruthlessly violated, if by doing so it is thought that a ver¬ 
dict may be won. This is not so much the deliberate ex parte pleading in 
which all favoring considerations are grossly exaggerated and all oppos¬ 
ing ones ignored or belittled; nor even the argumenta ad hominem in 
which passion, prejudice, clannishness, and all the weaknesses of men are 
appealed to that are the most reprehensible, for it is a very weak and 
ignorant jury nowadays that does not receive these appeals in the Pick¬ 
wickian sense. It is rather that countless brood of sly, slick, sneaking 
fallacies which fall in the category 7 of the “ undistributed middle,” that 
are really 7 dangerous and misleading. I surely mean no disrespect to my 
esteemed friends of the legal profession. For behold! a miracle! if you 
take one of these cold blooded butchers of logic and put him upon the 
bench it is not unlikely that he will soon give utterance to judicial de¬ 
cisions so sound, so just, so truly logical, that we are compelled to for¬ 
give him all his former logical atrocities. 
No greater contrast could be offered than that between the scientific 
method of seeking conclusions and the ex parte disputations which are 
the legacy 7 of antiquity and scholasticism. Slowly and almost imper- 
