Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/615

Rh ; defend yourself with arguments, not dogmatic assertions; and do not ask your adversaries for proofs stronger than those which you are ready to give. Above all, remember that you yourself are but mortal, and liable to err; and therefore that it is always within the bounds of possibility that your antagonist may be in the right, and you in the wrong. The man of science studies God's own handiwork; he approaches the truth reverently, yet fearlessly, seeking it for its own sake; and his conclusions cannot be lightly disregarded. Science may throw more light upon theology than theology can ever throw upon science. And the theologian who sincerely wishes to know and to spread the highest and clearest truths, will do well to take at least some lessons from the interpreters of Nature, and in all cases to treat the doctrines of science with the respect which is always due to honesty. Under all circumstances, whatever may be his private views and his desires, he will find it the part of wisdom not to commit himself publicly to either side of an unsettled question. Dogmatism on undecided points is worse than foolish.

Every now and then we meet with certain scientific dabblers who are silly through the medium of the newspapers. I refer to those unfortunate people who try to illustrate science with fanciful statistics. Of late, one of these statistical paragraphs has been going the rounds of the press. It treats of what the writer supposed to be physiological chemistry. First come some estimates as to the number of pairs of boots and the quantity of hats which might be made from the leather and felt imagined by the author to be formed by some obscure chemical process in the stomach. This is utilitarian science with a vengeance, but is eclipsed shortly when the brilliant popularizer of scientific knowledge asserts that a man of average size contains clay enough to make a dozen large bricks, and consumes carbonate of lime enough with his food to form a marble mantel-piece in a year! The estimates are really quite beautiful in their way, but are unfortunately like the French definition of a crab. Certain French lexicographers were one day hard at work, and had just defined a crab as "a little red fish which walks backward." Cuvier, entering just then, was asked what he thought of the definition. "Admirable!" said he, "only the crab is not a fish, it is not red, and it does not walk backward." I cannot vouch for the authenticity of this anecdote, yet it serves very well to illustrate the case in point. The newspaper scientist was about as accurate in his knowledge as were the lexicographers—especially in the brick-making item; for the two elements most characteristic of clay, namely, silicon and aluminum, are wholly wanting in the human system; or, if present, they are in such small quantities as to be undiscoverable by analysis.

This example is sufficient to illustrate this particular kind of dabbling. Some thorough scientific man makes a discovery, which is briefly alluded to in some foreign journal of popular science. The