Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/85

Rh ultimate efforts. Every species, every individual exists by virtue of having striven to attain these ends. In the structure of each one is the record of the attainment, partial or complete, as the case may be. And each man and woman of us is toiling in his or her way toward the same goal, unconscious of that something within us, greater than ourselves, that "guides us, blindfold but safe, from one age on to another." The burs and "stickers" that cling so persistently to our clothes are but a part of the same great effort. It is the only way sweet cicely, desmodium, the bur-marigold, and their kin have of traveling through the woods, and so on from forest to forest, from swamp tangle to swamp tangle. They live their lives as truly as a man lives his, with equally as good a purpose that is equally as well attained. Each embodies those essential qualities of living that the great teacher discerned when he bade men "consider the lilies of the field."



HE intelligent public, fickle and uncertain as it is, has apparently not entirely withdrawn its interest from one of the most important and suggestive of modern diplomatic entanglements, the Bering-Sea controversy. Although thought to have been finally settled by arbitration in 1893, the Paris award seems to constitute only the beginning of a new phase of the subject. The valuable investigations and interesting reports of the last American commissioner, Dr. Jordan, and of his English colleague have seemed to keep the matter alive in the public mind, and to the interested and informed reader they have furnished a fresh example of that curious tendency among scientific experts to come to conclusions diametrically opposed to each other, although starting with essentially the same data. Of course, everybody knows that it is essential to the proper carrying on of a scientific investigation that it be commenced with no preconceived notions as to how it is coming out, and that judgment should wait on fact, ever ready to incline this way or that, in obedience to the compelling laws of thought. Justice to the man of science obliges the admission that, take him in his laboratory or library, with no end in view except that of getting at the truth, he generally lives fairly well up to this high standard, and easily, too. But transform him by the magic influence of a handsome retainer, or any other like incentive, into a scientific expert, and he is a horse of another color. He must now assume a certain theory to be true,