Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/375

Rh is just this something which the student of one science learns from a sound exposition of another science by a proficient therein. Every true popularizer of science knows that among his readers, if not even forming the greater number of his readers, there will be men of science, working in other branches, but still bringing to the study of his treatise their scientific training. Writing for them, he will write in the manner best suited to popularize without vulgarizing science: "the coarser developments of sensationalism" will be avoided, even if the good sense of the scientific worker were not normally opposed to all such faults of style. The literature of science owes much to the recognition of this circumstance.

Some may question, however, whether scientific literature can be sufficiently remunerative to support science-workers, even though they should turn altogether from original research, and devote their whole time to writing about science. I do not think, however, that much anxiety need be felt on this score. Of course, scientific literature is not at present, and perhaps may never be, so remunerative as novel-writing, historical literature, biography, travels, and so on. Very few writers on science, however general the interest attached to their researches, have earned an income of (let us say) five thousand pounds annually for many successive years; and I suppose the successful novelist would regard such an income as contemptible. Probably, in the majority of instances, it would be only by an almost entire withdrawal from original work, that the writer on science could earn a steady income of half that amount; while that earnestness in the cause of science which can alone render scientific writings attractive would compel the scientific author to devote a large share of his time to unremunerative work. Yet there can be no doubt that many of our most successful workers in science have been able, without forsaking original research, to gain very sufficient incomes by scientific literature, or by the associated work of popular scientific lecturing. The chief objection, perhaps, to this way of rendering scientific research self-supporting consists in the fact that every hour devoted to