Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/262

 230 THE WILL IN NATURE.

less to repeat them here; I will merely add that I have since been assured on trustworthy authority that Dr. Brandis not only knew my work but even possessed it, as it was found among his property after his death. The unmerited obscurity to which writers like myself are long condemned, encourages such people to appropriate their thoughts without so much as naming them.

Another medical authority has carried this even farther; for, not content with the thought alone, he has appropriated to himself the expression of it also. I allude to Professor Anton Rosas of the University of Vienna, whose entire § 507 in the 1st vol. of his Textbook of Ophthalmology 2 (1830) is copied word for word from pp. 14-16 of my treatise On Vision and Colours (1816) without any mention whatever of me, or even the slightest hint that he is using the words of another. This sufficiently accounts for the care he has taken not to mention my treatise among the lists of twenty-one writings on Colours and forty on the Physiology of the Eye, which he gives in §§ 542 and 567; a caution which was however all the more advisable, as he had appropriated to himself a good deal more out of that pamphlet without mentioning me. All that is referred, for instance, in § 526 to "one" is only applicable to me. His entire § 527 is copied almost literally from my pp. 59 and 60. The theory which he introduces without further ceremony in § 535 by the word "evidently": that is, that yellow is 3/4 and violet 1/4 of the eye's activity, never was evident to anyone until I made it so; even to this day it is a truth known to few and acknowledged by fewer still, and much is yet wanting for example, that I should be dead and buried ere it be possible to call it evident without further ceremony. The matter will even have to wait till after my death to be seriously sifted, since a close investigation might easily bring to evidence the real difference

1 Rosas, Handbuch der Augenheilkunde [Handbook of Eye Medicine] (1830).