Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/33

Rh Let our first inquiry be, then, in what particular does he fail in the full discharge of his duties as a man of science and especially as an exponent of science among his fellows?

Without attempting to arrange the answers which suggest themselves in logical order, or, indeed, to select those of the first importance, I submit, to begin with, his inability or unwillingness, common but by no means universal, to present the results of his labors in a form intelligible to intelligent people. When inability, it is a misfortune, often the outgrowth, however, of negligence or indifference; when unwillingness, it becomes at least an offense, and one not indicative of the true scientific spirit. Unfortunately? we are not yet entirely out of the shadow of the middle ages, when learning was a mystery to all except a select few, or of the centuries a little later, when a scientific treatise must be entombed in a dead language or a scientific discovery embalmed in a cipher.

Many scientific men of excellent reputation are to-day guilty of the crime of unnecessary and often premeditated and deliberately planned mystification; in fact, almost by common consent this fault is overlooked in men of distinguished ability, if, indeed, it does not add a luster to the brilliancy of their attainments. It is usually regarded as a high compliment to say of A that, when he read his paper in the Mathematical Section, no one present was able to understand what it was about; or of B and his book that there are only three men in the world who can read it. We greatly, though silently, admire A and B, while C, the unknown, who has not yet won a reputation, and who ventures to discuss something which we do understand (after his clear and logical presentation of the subject), must go content with the patronizing admonition that there is really nothing new about this, and that if he will consult the pages of a certain journal of a few years ago, he will find the same idea, not developed, it is true, but hinted at and put aside for future consideration, or that he will find that Newton or Darwin declared what is essentially the same principle many years before. No one can deny that there are great reason and good judgment displayed in all this, but the ordinary layman is likely to inquire whether it is distributed and apportioned with nice discrimination; and it is the standpoint of the layman which we are occupying at the present moment.

All will admit that there are many men whose power in original thinking and profound research is far greater than their facility of expression, just as, on the other hand, there are many more men whose linguistic fluency is unembarrassed by intellectual activity, and representatives of both classes may be found among those usually counted as men of science. It is with the first only that we are concerned at the present moment, and it is sufficient to remark that their fault is relatively unimportant and