Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/213

Rh on the unknown, and futile to imagine that we can advance in science ourselves, or assist in its advancement in the world. It is that tedious, costly, and fatiguing process of laying a good foundation which no eye is ever to see, for a house to be built thereon for safety and enjoyment, for public uses or for monumental beauty. It is the labor of a week to be paid for on Saturday night. It is the slow recruiting, arming, drilling, victualing, and transporting of an entire army to secure victory in one short battle. It is the burden of dead-weight which every great discoverer has had to carry for years and years, unknown to the world at large, before the world was electrified by his appearance as its genius. Let us examine it more closely: it will repay our scrutiny. Those of you who have been more or less successfully at work all your lives may get some satisfaction from the retrospect, and those who have commenced careers should hear what deadwork means, what its uses are, how indispensable it is, how honorable it is, and what stores of health and strength and happiness it reserves for them.

My propositions, then, are these: 1. That, without a large amount of this dead-work, there can be no discovery of what is rightly called a scientific truth, 2. That, without a large amount of dead-work on the part of a teacher of science, he will fail in his efforts to impart true science to his scholars. 3. That, without a large amount of deadwork, no professional expert can properly serve, much less inform and command, his clients or employers. 4. That nothing but an habitual performance of dead-work can keep the scientific judgment in a safe and sound condition to meet emergencies, or prevent it from falling more or less rapidly into decrepitude; and, 5. That in the case of highly organized thinkers, disposed or obliged to exercise habitually the creative powers of the imagination, or to exhaust the will-power in frequently recurring decisions of difficult and doubtful questions, deadwork and plenty of it is their only salvation; nay, the most delicious and refreshing recreation; a panacea for disgust, discouragement, and care; an elixir vitae; a fountain of perpetual youth.

In expanding these propositions, I would illustrate them in some such homely ways as should make them seem near and familiar principles of conduct; and of course I can only do this out of the experience of my own life, and from observation of what has happened in the limited sphere of one department of scientific inquiry; but that should suffice, seeing that work is work, and science science, however various may be minds and their pursuits.

First, then, is it so that scientific truths can not be discovered without a large amount of preliminary dead-work? Surely no one in this assembly doubts it who has established even one original theory for himself, or won for it the suffrages of judges capable of weighing evidence. Now, the immense disproportion in numbers between theories broached and theories accepted is the best proof we could have.