Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 10.djvu/560

542 he could acquaint himself with the-strongest arguments in favor of evolution. I wrote back in all good faith and simplicity, recommending him to go through a course of comparative anatomy and physiology, and then to study development. I am sorry to say he was very much displeased, as people often are with good advice. Notwithstanding this discouraging result, I venture, as a parting word, to repeat the suggestion, and to say to all the more or less acute lay and clerical "paper-philosophers" who venture into the regions of biological controversy—Get a little sound, thorough, practical, elementary instruction in biology.



E are too apt in these times of popular education, and the cheap diffusion of knowledge, to forget the cost of scientific truth. We formulate a fact or principle, and administer it in the school-room, with but little regard to the circumstance that it may have cost thousands of years of toil to discover and establish it. We have found out, for example, a great deal about the figure, motions, and astronomical relations of the earth, with such exactness that, as Prof. Young tells us, we know the semi-diameter of our globe at the equator within two hundred feet—while to go "around the world" is now a mere frolic; and all this knowledge is given to children in an hour's lesson. But how few appreciate the long struggle of the human intellect in arriving at these simple results! Let us hastily glance at the early efforts of the human mind in trying to find out what sort of thing this earth is, in its form, extent, and relation to the heavenly bodies that surround it.

The history of the growth of any branch of knowledge has a double interest: that which comes from the knowledge itself, and its relation to the history of the operations of the human mind. Men think under the limitations of their times both as regards the extent