Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/257

Rh good local collection should represent, in its specimens, the zoology, botany, and geology of the district. It should be arranged with a view to teaching, and, instead of being crowded with a multiplicity of objects, should consist of carefully-selected, well-arranged, and clearly-labelled types of the classes, orders, families, and leading genera of animals and plants, extant in the region, and gathered in their fossil vestiges, from its geological formations, which are at the same time represented by classified minerals.

The plan now suggested, by which it would become the official duty of college authorities to bring together the products of a region, so that they would be accessible to everybody in quest of this kind of information, and at the same time tributary to the purposes of science, would give us museums worthy of the name, and secure the proper objects of their establishment.

In every aspect, therefore, the project of establishing so close a connection between State geological explorations and our higher educational institutions is to be cordially commended; and it is not the least of its advantages that it coincides with the great tendencies of educational reform, and offers an efficient method of carrying it forward.

our correspondence for this month will be found a letter from a distinguished American physiologist, approving the position taken by Mr. Godwin in his speech at the Tyndall dinner, as "a protest, not against science, but in its behalf, and against the damaging influence of pretended followers or mistaken friends;" and this view expresses, we are assured, the conviction of many professionally scientific men of the present time.

"We have no desire to prolong controversy, but, with all respect to the professional authorities, we must continue to. think that the efforts to limit and confine scientific investigation in the present age are not in the interest of true science; nor can we see how they differ from attempts to obstruct the advance of thought that have been made in preceding ages. There has always been a party unwilling to allow science to find its own limits. They have forbidden each step of its progress, and demanded that it should keep within its sphere, for the sake of its own good. They have never denied science, or questioned its authority, but only demanded that it should consult its own interests by staying in its proper place. When the work of investigating Nature was seriously commenced, some three or four centuries ago, "Aristotle," "Galen," and "Mathematics," were terms used to define the scope of legitimate science; and, when the first great step forward was taken, and men began to question the tradition of the flatness of the earth, they were sharply met with the charge that they were going beyond their sphere and damaging science itself. Men were as free as the wind to pursue true science—that is, to accept Aristotelian and Galenic dicta, and to cultivate the whole range of mathematics. The ideal world was a sphere of exact and eternal truth; external Nature was a mere flux of sensuous appearances, not suspected to be a sphere of law; the attempt to study her was therefore to invade the ancient and inviolable limits of science. Hence, in denying the flatness of the earth, and affirming its sphericity, the early inquirers not only shocked common-sense but were charged with violating every canon of established scientific method. Exactly the same considerations that are now urged were urged then with tenfold force, and the antagonists of the new doctrine might well have said that they "did not propose to cramp scientific inquiry,