Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 42.djvu/802

780 us for reminding him (memory is sometimes inconvenient) of his own words in 1888. His own views of palæolithic man were then as unsound as, according to him, are those of Prof. Wright to-day. In this very magazine he wrote, "Among the most recent and satisfactory archæologic discoveries of this country are those of two chipped implements of black flint found in Ohio by Dr. Metz at Madisonville and Loveland, in deposits of loess and aqueo-glacial gravel which G. F. Wright has shown to represent a closing episode of the later Glacial epoch." Again, "Excluding all doubtful cases, there remains a fairly consistent body of testimony indicating the existence of a human population in North America during the later Ice epoch."

Much more might be quoted, but we will spare the feelings of our critic. It is not fair to taunt a man with change of mind. Every scientist should be open to conviction and therefore subject to change. But we do look for a more tolerant spirit from one who has so recently seen fit to change his own faith on an important subject. He has been converted from the error of his ways, and now looks down on his benighted brethren, not with pity, but with feigned contempt. We would fain know the causes of his conversion, but forbear to speculate, and will rather believe that his logical mind has yielded to arguments which he could not resist and which bade him destroy a faith which once he preached. Possibly the evidence derived from the new science of Gee-omorphy has been largely instrumental in working this transformation.

We will not repeat what we have already said about the divergent views on the nature of the Ice age, further than to remark for the benefit of this critic that Whewell's wise saw above quoted may be recalled with advantage here.

Nor will we further follow this extraordinary effusion. Most of its charges have been made by others in less offensive terms and already noticed in this paper. Suffice it to say that we find it hard to comprehend how a scientist could allow his better judgment to be so far entirely overridden. No surer indication of a bad case can be given than "calling names," and next time he enters the arena we advise our indignant champion to submit to the careful search of some calm and judicious friend who will see to it that he carries into the field no unknightly weapons concealed about his person—in other words, that he request a friend to aid him in confining his exuberance of language within due bounds by the expurgation of such idiosyncratic terms as "egotistical," "incompetent," "shyster," "dupe," "knave," "harpy," "betinseled charlatan," with others of a similar nature which are not usually found in the current vocabulary of his scientific co-workers.