Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/212

202 is fulfilling its destiny by advancing science in America. If, unhappily, our meetings should rather tend to cultivate a love f or bric-à-brac in science, if the stimulation and gratification of a quasi-animal curiosity for scientific novelties be fostered, if our discussions should become hot-beds of a more vigorous vegetation of personal vanity, intellectual pugnacity, lust for notoriety, literary jealousies, conceited reclamations, petty ambitions, or pecuniary schemes, how are our day and generation to be benefited or improved? If our attention become restricted to the details of the creation, and to the smaller manoeuvres of the forces of Nature; or if, on the other hand, we become habituated in the indulgence of vague generalizations, suggestions of possible theories, and half-completed or merely sketched and outlined hypotheses—how are we ourselves, as workers of science, to escape deterioration?

I can not shake off a suspicion that we talk and write too much; that the whole world talks too much; and that the golden time for silence is precisely then when we come together to talk. Were each of us to utter only what he absolutely knows, what he is quite sure of, what he has unimpeachable facts in sufficient number to confirm—what a sudden illumination would overspread our meetings, glorifying our science, and reinspiring us all! But I turn from the Utopian fancy, and invite your attention to a very different theme.

There is a topic which I think should be frequently considered by all who engage in scientific pursuits; and by none so earnestly as by those who are ambitious to reach the higher points of view, from which to survey and describe those systematic combinations of phenomena which are more or less panoramic: I allude of course to generalizers or discoverers of natural laws, and the professional teachers of such laws; while those who deal in itemized science, the mere observers of isolated facts, discriminating specimens and naming genera and species in the animal, vegetable, or mineral worlds, and especially such as occupy themselves with geographical and geological studies in detail, stand in less need of having it pressed upon their attention, because in their case it insists upon its own necessity.

I allude to what is technically known among experts as "dead-work."

This topic has to be treated in the most prosaic style. To describe dead-work is to narrate all those portions of our work which consume the most time, give the most trouble, require the greatest patience and endurance, and seem to produce the most insignificant results. It comprises the collection, collation, comparison, and adjustment, the elimination, correction, and re-selection, the calculation and representation—in a word, the entire first, second, and third handling of our data in any branch of human learning—wholly perfunctory, preparatory, and mechanical, wholly tentative, experimental, and defensive—without which it is dangerous to proceed a single stage into reasoning