Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/214

204 not only of the value and necessity of dead-work, but of the scarcity of those who depend upon it as a preparatory stage of theorizing. And, moreover, not theories only, but simple statements of fact believed and disbelieved, that is, finally accepted or finally rejected, exhibit the like numerical disproportion, and betray a general carelessness or laziness of observers; at all events, their manifest lack of appreciation of the value and necessity of the dead-work part of observation, which imperatively must precede any clear mental perception of the simplest phenomenon, before the attempt is made to establish its natural relationships, and present it for acceptance as a part of science.

A geologist travels far to collect fossils at a particularly good locality, stops there a day or two, fills his valise, and returns to publish a paper on it. What is his paper worth? Were he first to spend a week in making himself acquainted with the whole vicinity, a second week in making measured sections of all the cognate outcrops in the neighborhood, a third week in carefully differentiating the specific horizons, and a fourth week in verifying their reliability, and in correcting his first mistakes, then, surely, whatever labor he should afterward expend upon his collection of life-forms would have its full value, and any paper he might write would be an important contribution to his branch of science.

I have known men settle to their own satisfaction some of the greatest problems in geology by a flying reconnaissance; triumphantly overturning a mass of accumulated science slowly brought to demonstration by many years of conscientious dead-work, which they did not seem to think it worth their while to verify, I have known men reclassify the elements of a geological system by a few sections, not a single one of which was properly measured by them, or could be properly put on paper in a graphic form for precise comparison. I have known men make what they called a geological map, without having run a single instrumental line themselves; with every outcrop inaccurately placed; with only here and there an accidental note of strike and dip, and even this not oriented with a close approximation to precision; covering a region requiring the study of many months with a few weeks of what they fondly called field-work, and basing on such a map generalizations of the first rank, for which they expected the world of science to give them credit—which in the long run it certainly will, but not the kind of credit they anticipate.

Now, the experience of a long and active life of science has trained me to regard all such work as careless work, lazy work. Not that such workers are lazy men in the common meaning of the word; on the contrary, they are busy, bustling, active, energetic, indefatigable men; in fact, too much so. In science there is a laziness of quite another definition—namely, a chronic dislike, a deep-seated disability, for the dead-work which first disciplines to accuracy, then makes