Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/149

Rh Hermann Fol, of the University of Geneva, described his studies on animal individuality, embracing particularly his researches into the origin of double beings, two-headed monsters, and the like. Professor F. A. Forel presented an interesting paper on the variations of temperature of the Swiss lakes, which he has made the subject of several years of study. Professor Suess, of Vienna, read a paper in exposition of the modern theory of the upheaval of mountains. Professor Clausius, of Berne, was elected president of the society.

False Knowledge.—Dr. Oliver Marcy, geologist and classicist, and formerly President of the Northwestern University, has some sensible remarks on educational fallacies, in the Chicago "Evening Herald": "There is much wrong education. The human mind is burdened with false knowledge. It comes to us in tradition. It constitutes a large part of our libraries. All the false notions of the ancients stand upon our shelves. False knowledge is forced upon us in the instruction we receive. We are taught that we must go to school to the ancients; that they had the truth, and knew more and were wiser than the people of this age; that in the art of composition, both in prose and in poetry, the moderns are inferior to the men of ancient time; that it is necessary, in order to acquire a good style in English, to study composition in Greek, a language whose structure is wholly unlike that of the English. The Greek mythology is represented as a beautiful blossom of the human intellect, worthy of years of patient study. We are taught that a man educated in the knowledge that existed 300 years before Christ is better educated than a man educated in the knowledge of the nineteenth century. If these are not fallacies, what ground have we for expecting that the human race will have any better mental condition in the future? If these are not fallacies, what has become of the law of progress? One of the most detrimental fallacies imbibed with our education is the notion that words have a potency of meaning in themselves. The truth is, they have only such meanings as we attach to them. They stand for notions already in our minds. When uttered or written they have no power to generate the same notions in other minds as they represent to us, unless the other parties have associated these same notions with the sounds we utter or sets of visible marks similar to those we write. Meaning does not exist in a word by virtue of its root or its history. Roots and word histories are of interest in the study of words as such in philology, but, in the selection of a word to express an idea, the question is not what the word has stood for in the minds of persons long since dead, but what it stands for now in the minds of the living. The new meaning of every word is different from its old meaning, and in some cases the new meaning is directly contrary to that of the old. No one can obtain the new notion from the study of the old word; for instance, the notion which is now represented by the word animal. The Greek anemos stood for wind and for a breath. The Latin anima stood for spirit and life, as then understood. The Latin animal stood for a living being; but no Roman or Latin ever used this word to represent the idea for which the word now stands in the mind of the scientific man, for the modern idea had no existence in those days. The man whose vernacular is the English tongue takes a very indirect route, and makes a very unproductive journey, when he seeks the meaning of the now English word animal through its roots and its history. The present meaning can be obtained only by observing and studying animals themselves in connection with the thoughts and observations of modern investigators. Persons who get into the habit of obtaining their ideas from Latin and Greek roots generally have no disposition to seek knowledge in any other way. They are satisfied with the imperfect notions which they thus obtain from the old words, and forever remain ignorant of the real nature of the things for which the new words stand. Agassiz was so impressed with the fallacy of names that he never permitted his students to know the name of an object of study till they had formed a proper notion of it by a minute study of the object itself. Names to the ignorant convey but very superficial notions. These fallacies are affecting the education, the life, and the thinking of all our people. We should throw them off as we grow in clear thinking, as the growing lobster throws off his shell. There is much confusion of mind