Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/704

688 another planet beyond. But I trust that I have now made it evident to you that this confident expectation is not justified by any absolute necessity of Nature, but arises entirely out of our belief in her uniformity; and into the grounds of this and other primary beliefs, which serve as the foundation of all scientific reasoning, we shall presently inquire.

There is another class of cases, in which an equal certainty is generally claimed for conclusions that seem to flow immediately from observed facts, though really evolved by intellectual processes; the apparent simplicity and directness of those processes either causing them to be overlooked or veiling the assumptions on which they are based. Thus Mr. Lockyer speaks as confidently of the sun's chromosphere of incandescent hydrogen, and of the local outbursts which cause it to send forth projections tens of thousands of miles high, as if he had been able to capture a flask of this gas, and had generated water by causing it to unite with oxygen.

Yet this confidence is entirely based on the assumption that a certain line which is seen in the spectrum of a hydrogen-flame means hydrogen also when seen in the spectrum of the sun's chromosphere; and, high as is the probability of that assumption, it cannot be regarded as a demonstrated certainty, since it is by no means inconceivable that the same line might be produced by some other substance at present unknown. And so, when Dr. Huggins deduces, from the different relative positions of certain lines in the spectra of different stars, that these stars are moving from or toward us in space, his train of reasoning is based on the assumption that these lines have the same meaning—that is, that they represent the same elements—in every luminary. That assumption, like the preceding, may be regarded as possessing a sufficiently high probability to justify the reasoning based upon it; more especially since, by the other researches of that excellent observer, the same chemical elements have been detected as vapors in those filmy cloudlets which seem to be stars in an early stage of consolidation. But, when Frankland and Lockyer, seeing in the spectrum of the yellow solar prominences a certain bright line not identifiable with that of any known terrestrial flame, attribute this to an hypothetical new substance which they propose to call Helium, it is obvious that their assumption rests on a far less secure foundation, until it shall have received that verification which, in the case of Mr. Crooke's researches on Thallium, was afforded by the actual discovery of the new metal, the presence of which had been indicated to him by a line in the spectrum not attributable to any substance then known.

In a large number of other cases, moreover, our scientific interpretations are clearly matters of judgment; and this is eminently a personal act, the value of its results depending in each case upon the qualifications of the individual for arriving at a correct decision. The surest of such judgments are those dictated by what we term