Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/209

Rh is the ability of the child to carry its nurse, and this it can only attain to through the discipline of toil—toil which at first conceals itself under the gracious guise of sports, gymnastics, and adventures, and afterward takes the shape of experimental failures and useless constructions, but all as free, untutored, and original as the laughing, wasteful, and ungovernable pranks of Nature. But I have followed long enough, perhaps you will think too long, this train of thought. Let me suggest another.

It is a familiar fact that great discoveries come at long intervals, brought by specially commissioned and highly endowed messengers, while a perpetual procession of humbler servants of Nature arrive with gifts of lesser moment, but equally genuine, curious, and interesting novelties. The excitement of the pageant incapacitates us for reasoning rightly on its meaning. From what unknown land does all this wealth of information come? Who are these bearers of it? and who intrusted each with his particular burden, which he carries aloft as if it deserved exclusive admiration? Why do those who bring the best things walk so seriously and modestly along, as if they were in the performance of a sacred duty for which they scarcely esteem themselves worthy; while those who have little to show, or things of inferior or doubtful value, strut and grimace magnificently, as if they felt themselves the especial favorites of Nature, push to the front, speak loudly to the multitude, and evidently deem themselves entitled to uncommon honors?

In this procession of science, in this interminable show of discovery, two facts arrest attention: first, the eager gaze of expectation which the crowd of lookers-on direct toward the quarter from which the procession comes, and their unaccountable indifference to what has already passed; and, secondly, the wonderful disappearance, the more or less sudden vanishing out of the very hands of the carriers, of a large majority of the facts and theories of which they make so pompous an exposure; few of them, however, seeming to be aware that thereby they have lost their right to participate in the pageant, and should retire from it into the throng of spectators, at least until good fortune should take pity on them, and drop some new trifle at their feet to soothe their wounded vanity.

You will not suspect me of depreciating the value of any real discovery, be it merely the finding of a Californian bird on the shore of Massachusetts Bay, or detecting with the naked eye the blazing of a variable star before any telescope had noticed it, or finding some Hadrosaurus bones in a New Jersey marl-pit, or a Paradoxides at the Quincy quarries? Such accidents have all the importance of trumpet notes sounding to boots and saddle. But, after all, the trumpeter is only a trumpeter, although he may imagine himself the colonel of the regiment or a general in the army; and, indeed, it has happened that to such accidents Science has owed some of her best physicists and