Page:Stirling William The Canon 1897.djvu/14

viii and advance himself is, in the abstract, no advance upon a citizen of Athens, in the time of Pericles, who never travelled faster than a bullock cart could take him, in all his life.

Science has no marvels; every so-called discovery heralded as marvellous (for men of science understand the power of bold advertisement to the full as well as scientists in clog dancing, in hair dressing, and tightrope walking), is not a marvel in the true meaning of the word.

The Röntgen Rays, the microphone, the phonograph, are all as simple in themselves as is the property of amber rubbed to take up straws. From the beginning there have been Röntgen Rays, and the principles of microphone and phonograph are coeval with the world. The wonder lies not in the discovery (so-called), but in the fact they have remained so long unknown. The real mystery of mysteries is the mind of man. Why, with a pen or brush, one man sits down and makes a masterpiece, and yet another, with the selfsame instruments and opportunities, turns out a daub or botch, is twenty times more curious than all the musings of the mystics, works of the Rosicrucians, or the mechanical contrivances which seem to-day so fine, and which our children will disdain as clumsy. The conquests of the mind never grow stale, let he who doubts it read a page of Plato and compare it with some à la mode philosopher.

I take it that one of the objects of the author of this work is to sustain, that in astronomy, in mathematics, and in certain other branches of