Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/678

650 scientific, the progress of such a controversy is often very entertaining. It is true that the actual battles take place in places beyond our ken, generally at meetings of scientific societies, where the orators have it all their own way and confound their adversaries—till the opposition society meets. But though the philosophers retire for fighting purposes, and do battle in the clouds with weapons, phrases, and formulæ, that we cannot understand, they always come down again to earth to proclaim their victories or palliate their defeats. Once they come down, and we catch them with pens in their hands, the outsiders have their turn.

It is not, however, in the great books of Darwin, Huxley, Lyell, Helmholtz, Tait, or Thomson, that we may seek food for amusement. In these works every thought is in full dress and every phrase decorous. But there is another sort of literature in which we see the great men, so to speak, with their coats off. The "Proceedings" of the learned societies where the real fighting goes on are full of entertainment. Students of human nature need no further proof that, though every man may not be a philosopher, every philosopher is certainly a man. With what frank enjoyment they fight! With what irony—what sarcasm they annihilate their foes! It must, however, be confessed that sarcasm is not, as a rule, the strong point of the learned. The editor of a northern newspaper of our acquaintance was one day speaking in terms of praise of his sub-editor: "The brilliancy of yon young man," said he, "is surprising; the facility with which he jokes amazes me. I, myself, am in the habit of joking, but I joke with difficulty." We have observed the same peculiarity among other learned persons. They joke, but not with ease.

Most of the books which we have prefixed to this paper contain their authors' thoughts polished ad unguem. It would not be fair to judge of the opinions of the scientific persons we quote by any other standard than that which they have themselves carefully prepared; but yet we cannot refrain from entertaining a preference for the rough-and-ready, hard-hitting pamphlets, lectures, "proceedings," inaugural addresses, and the like, from which, almost without exception, these works have been compiled. For example, Mr. Croll's work on "Climate and Time" is everything which a scientific work should be that requires deep research and laborious thought, combined with the boldest generalization; but it is a digest of some five or six and thirty papers contributed to scientific magazines and periodicals during several years. Mr. Croll gives a list of his papers at the end of his volume. But though it is most convenient to see the whole before us at a glance, and to have them all under our hand or on the library-shelf, yet we acknowledge that while thinking over Mr. Croll's volume, for the purposes of this review, we found ourselves again and again going back to the pages of the Reader and the Philosophical Magazine, in which we first made acquaintance with them. It may be prejudice