Popular Science Monthly/Volume 46/November 1894/Unsolved Problems of Science
| UNSOLVED PROBLEMS OF SCIENCE.[1] |
By the Most Hon. the MARQUIS OF SALISBURY, K. G., D. C. L., F. R. S.
CHANCELLOR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD.
MY functions are of a more complicated character than usually is assigned to the occupants of this chair. As Chancellor of the University it is my duty to tender to the British Association a hearty welcome, which it is my duty as President of the Association to accept. As President of the Association I convey, most unworthily, the voice of English science, as many worthy and illustrious presidents have done before me; but in representing the university I represent far more fittingly the learners who are longing to hear the lessons which the first teachers of English science have come as visitors to teach. I am bound to express on behalf of the university our sense of the good feeling toward that body which is the motive of this unusual arrangement; but, as far as I am personally concerned, it is attended with some embarrassing results. In presence of the high priests of science I am only a layman, and all the skill of all the chemists the association contains will not transmute a layman into any more precious kind of metal. Yet it is my hard destiny to have to address on scientific matters probably the most competent scientific audience in the world. If a country gentleman, who was also a colonel of volunteers, were by any mental aberration on the part of the commander-in-chief to be appointed to review an army corps at Aldershot, all military men would doubtless feel a deep compassion for his inevitable fate. I bespeak some spark of that divine emotion when I am attempting to discharge under similar conditions a scarcely less hopeless duty. At least, however, I have the consolation of feeling that I am free from some of the anxieties which have fallen to those who have preceded me as presidents in this city. The relations of the association and the university are those of entire sympathy and good will, as becomes common workers in the sacred cause of diffusing enlightenment and knowledge. But we must admit that it was not always so. A curious record of a very different state of feeling came to light last year in the interesting biography of Dr. Pusey, which is the posthumous work of Canon Liddon. In it is related the first visit of the association to Oxford in 1832. Mr. Keble, at that time a leader of university thought, writes indignantly to his friend to complain that the honorary degree of D. C. L. had been bestowed upon some of the most distinguished members of the association. "The Oxford doctors," he says, "have truckled sadly to the spirit of the times in receiving the hodge-podge of philosophers as they did." It is amusing, at this distance of time, to note the names of the hodge-podge of philosophers whose academical distinction so sorely vexed Mr. Keble's gentle spirit. They were Brown, Brewster, Faraday, and Dalton. When we recollect the lovable and serene character of Keble's nature, and that he was at that particular date probably the man in the university who had the greatest power over other men's minds, we can measure the distance we have traversed since that time, and the rapidity with which the converging paths of these two intellectual luminaries, the university and the association, have approximated to each other. This sally of Mr. Keble's was no passing or accidental caprice. It represented a deep-seated sentiment in this place of learning, which had its origin in historic causes, and which has only died out in our time. One potent cause of it was that both bodies were teachers of science, but did not then in any degree attach the same meaning to that word. Science with the university for many generations bore a signification different from that which belongs to it in this assembly. It represented the knowledge which alone in the middle ages was thought worthy of the name of science. It was the knowledge gained not by external observation, but by mere reflection. The student's microscope was turned inward upon the recesses of his own brain; and when the supply of facts and realities failed, as it very speedily did, the scientific imagination was not wanting to furnish to successive generations an interminable series of conflicting speculations. That science science in our academical sense—had its day of rapid growth, of boundless aspiration, of enthusiastic votaries. It fascinated the rising intellect of the time, and it is said—people were not particular about figures in those days—that its attractions were at one time potent enough to gather round the university thirty thousand students, who for the sake of learning its teaching were willing to endure a life of the severest hardship. Such a state of feeling is now an archæological curiosity. The revolt against Aristotle is now some three centuries old. But the mental sciences which were supposed to rest upon his writings have retained some of their ascendency even till this day, and have only slowly and jealously admitted the rivalry of the growing sciences of observation. The subject is interesting to us, as this undecided state of feeling colored the experiences of this association at its last Oxford visit, nearly a generation later, in 1860. The warmth of the encounters which then took place have left a vivid impression on the minds of those who are old enough to have witnessed them. That much energy was on that occasion converted into heat may, I think, be inferred from the mutual distance which the two bodies have since maintained. Whereas the visit of 1832 was succeeded by another visit in fifteen years, and the visit of 1847 was succeeded by another visit in thirteen years, the year 1860 was followed by a long and dreary interval of separation, which has only now, after four-and-thirty years, been terminated. It has required the lapse of a generation to draw the curtain of oblivion over those animated scenes. It was popularly supposed that deep divergences upon questions of religion were the motive force of those high controversies. To some extent that impression was correct. But men do not always discern the motives which are really urging them, and I suspect that in many cases religious apprehensions only masked the resentment of the older learning at the appearance and claims of its younger rival. In any case, there is something worthy of note, and something that conveys encouragement, in the difference of the feeling which prevails now and the feeling that was indicated then. Few men are now influenced by the strange idea that questions of religious belief depend on the issues of physical research. Few men, whatever their creed, would now seek their geology in the books of their religion, or, on the other hand, would fancy that the laboratory or the microscope could help them to penetrate the mysteries which hang over the nature and the destiny of the soul of man. And the old learning no longer contests the share in education which is claimed by the new, or is blind to the supreme influence which natural knowledge is exercising in molding the human mind.
A study of the addresses of my learned predecessors in this office shows me that the main duty which it falls to a president to perform in his introductory address is to remind you of the salient points in the annals of science since last the association visited the town in which he is speaking. Most of them have been able to lay before you in all its interesting detail the history of the particular science of which each one of them was the eminent representative. If I were to make any such attempt I should only be telling you with very inadequate knowledge a story which is from time to time told you, as well as it can be told, by men who are competent to deal with it. It will be more suitable to my capacity if I devote the few observations I have to make to a survey not of our science but of our ignorance. We live in a small, bright oasis of knowledge, surrounded on all sides by a vast unexplored region of impenetrable mystery. From age to age the strenuous labor of successive generations wins a small strip from the desert and pushes forward the boundary of knowledge. Of such triumphs we are justly proud. It is a less attractive task—but yet it has its fascination as well as its uses—to turn our eyes to the undiscovered country which still remains to be won, to some of the stupendous problems of natural study which still defy our investigation. Instead, therefore, of recounting to you what has been done, or trying to forecast the discoveries of the future, I would rather draw your attention to the condition in which we stand toward three or four of the most important physical questions which it has been the effort of the last century to solve.
Of the scientific enigmas which still, at the end of the nineteenth century, defy solution, the nature and origin of what are called the elements is the most notable. It is not, perhaps, easy to give a precise logical reason for the feeling that the existence of our sixty-five elements is a strange anomaly and conceals some much simpler state of facts; but the conviction is irresistible. We can not conceive, on any possible doctrine of cosmogony, how these sixty-five elements came into existence. A third of them form the substance of this planet. Another third are useful, but somewhat rare. The remaining third are curiosities scattered haphazard, but very scantily, over the globe, with no other apparent function but to provide occupation for the collector and the chemist. Some of them are so like each other that only a chemist can tell them apart; others differ immeasurably from each other in every conceivable particular. In cohesion, in weight, in conductivity, in melting point, in chemical proclivities they vary in every degree. They seem to have as much relation to each other as the pebbles on a sea beach or the contents of an ancient lumber room. Whether you believe that Creation was the work of design or of inconscient law, it is equally difficult to imagine how this random collection of dissimilar materials came together. Many have been the attempts to solve this enigma, but up till now they have left it more impenetrable than before. A conviction that here was something to discover lay beneath the persistent belief in the possibility of the transmutation of other metals into gold, which brought the alchemy of the middle ages into being. When the immortal discovery of Dalton established that the atoms of each of these elements have a special weight of their own, and that consequently they combine in fixed ponderable proportions from which they never depart, it renewed the hope that some common origin of the elements was in sight. The theory was advanced that all these weights were multiples of the weight of hydrogen—in other words, that each elementary atom was only a greater or a smaller number of hydrogen atoms compacted by some strange machinery into one. The most elaborate analyses, conducted by chemists of the highest eminence—conspicuously by the illustrious Stas—were directed to the question whether there was any trace in fact of the theoretic idea that the atoms of each element consist of so many atoms or even of so many half-atoms of hydrogen. But the reply of the laboratories has always been clear and certain—that there is not in the facts the faintest foundation for such a theory.
Then came the discovery of the spectrum analysis, and men thought that with an instrument of such inconceivable delicacy we should at last find out something as to the nature of the atom. The result has been wholly disappointing. Spectrum analysis in the hands of Dr. Huggins and Mr. Lockyer and others has taught us things of which the world little expected to be told. We have been enabled to measure the speed with which clouds of blazing hydrogen course across the surface of the sun; we have learned the pace—the fabulous pace—at which the most familiar stars have been for ages approaching to or receding from our planet, without apparently affecting the proportions of the patterns which, as far as historical record goes back, they have always delineated on the evening sky. We have received some information about the elementary atoms themselves. We have learned that each sort of atom, when heated, strikes upon the ether a vibration, or set of vibrations, whose rate is all its own; and that no one atom or combination of atoms, in producing its own spectrum, encroaches even to the extent of a single line upon the spectrum that is peculiar to its neighbor. We have learned that the elements which exist in the stars, and especially in the sun, are mainly those with which we are familiar upon earth. There are a few lines in excess to which we can give no terrestrial name; and there are some still more puzzling gaps in our list. It is a great aggravation of the mystery which besets the question of the elements that, among the lines which are absent from the spectrum of the sun, those of nitrogen and oxygen stand first. Oxygen constitutes the largest portion of the solid and liquid substance of our planet, so far as we know it; and nitrogen is very far the predominant constituent of our atmosphere. If the earth is a detached bit whirled off the mass of the sun, as cosmogonists love to tell us, how comes it that in leaving the sun we cleaned him out so completely of his nitrogen and oxygen that not a trace of these gases remains behind to be discovered even by the sensitive vision of the spectroscope?
All these things the discovery of the spectrum analysis has added to our knowledge; but it has left us as ignorant as ever as to the nature of the capricious differences which separate the atoms from each other, or the cause to which those differences are due.
In the last few years the same enigma has been approached from another point of view by Prof. Mendeléeff. The periodic law which he has discovered reflects on him all the honor that can be earned by ingenious, laborious, and successful research. He has shown that this perplexing list of elements can be divided into families of about seven, speaking very roughly; that those families all resemble each other in this, that as to weight, volume, heat, and laws of combination, the members of each family are ranked among themselves in obedience to the same rule. Each family differs from the others, but each internally is constructed upon the same plan. It was a strange discovery—strangest of all in its manifest defects; for in the plan of his families there were blanks left—places not filled up because the properly constituted elements required according to his theory had not been found to fill them. For a moment their absence seemed a weakness in the professor's idea, and gave an arbitrary aspect to his scheme. But the weakness was turned into strength when, to the astonishment of the scientific world, three of the elements which were missing made their appearance in answer to his call. He had described beforehand the qualities they ought to have; and gallium, germanium, and scandium, when they were discovered shortly after the publication of his theory, were found to be duly clothed with the qualities he required in each. This remarkable confirmation has left Mendeléeff's periodic law in an unassailable position. But it has rather thickened than dissipated the mystery which hangs over the elements. The discovery of these co-ordinate families dimly points to some identical origin, without suggesting the method of their genesis or the nature of their common parentage. If they were organic beings, all our difficulties would be solved by muttering the comfortable word "evolution"—one of those indefinite words from time to time vouchsafed to humanity, which have the gift of alleviating so many perplexities and masking so many gaps in our knowledge. But the families of elementary atoms do not breed; and we can not therefore ascribe their ordered difference to accidental variations perpetuated by heredity under the influence of natural selection. The rarity of iodine, and the abundance of its sister chlorine, can not be attributed to the survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence. We can not account for the minute difference which persistently distinguishes nickel from cobalt, by ascribing it to the recent inheritance by one of them of an advantageous variation from the parent stock.
The upshot is that all these successive triumphs of research, Dalton's, Kirchhoff's, Mendeléeff 's, greatly as they have added to our store of knowledge, have gone but little way to solve the problem which the elementary atoms have for centuries presented to mankind. What the atom of each element is, whether it is a movement, or a thing, or a vortex, or a point having inertia, whether there is any limit to its divisibility, and, if so, how that limit is imposed, whether the long list of elements is final, or whether any of them have any common origin, all these questions remain surrounded by a darkness as profound as ever. The dream which lured the alchemists to their tedious labors, and which may be said to have called chemistry into being, has assuredly not been realized, but it has not yet been refuted. The boundary of our knowledge in this direction remains where it was many centuries ago.
The next discussion to which I should look in order to find unsolved riddles which have hitherto defied the scrutiny of science, would be the question of what is called the ether. The ether occupies a highly anomalous position in the world of science. It may be described as a half-discovered entity. I dare not use any less pedantic word than entity to designate it, for it would be a great exaggeration of our knowledge if I were to speak of it as a body or even as a substance. When, nearly a century ago. Young and Fresnel discovered that the motions of an incandescent particle were conveyed to our eyes by undulation, it followed that between our eyes and the particle there must be something to undulate. In order to furnish that something, the notion of the ether was conceived, and for more than two generations the main, if not the only, function of the word ether has been to furnish a nominative case to the verb "to undulate." Lately, our conception of this entity has received a notable extension. One of the most brilliant of the services which Prof. Maxwell has rendered to science has been the discovery that the figure which expressed the velocity of light, also expressed the multiplier required to change the measure of static or passive electricity into that of dynamic or active electricity. The interpretation reasonably affixed to this discovery is that, as light and the electric impulse move approximately at the same rate through space, it is probable that the undulations which convey them are undulations of the same medium. And as induced electricity penetrates through everything, or nearly everything, it follows that the ether through which its undulations are propagated must pervade all space, whether empty or full, whether occupied by opaque matter or transparent matter, or by no matter at all. The attractive experiments by which the late Prof. Hertz illustrated the electric vibrations of the ether will only be alluded to by me, in order that I may express the regret deeply and generally felt that death should have terminated prematurely the scientific career which had begun with such brilliant promise and such fruitful achievements. But the mystery of the ether, though it has been made more fascinating by these discoveries, remains even more inscrutable than before. Of this all-pervading entity we know absolutely nothing except this one fact, that it can be made to undulate. Whether, outside the influence of matter on the motion of its waves, ether has any effect on matter or matter upon it, is absolutely unknown. And even its solitary function of undulating ether performs in an abnormal fashion which has caused infinite perplexity. All fluids that we know transmit any blow they have received by waves which undulate backward and forward in the path of their own advance. The ether undulates athwart the path of the wave's advance. The genius of Lord Kelvin has recently discovered what he terms a labile state of equilibrium, in which a fluid that is infinite in its extent may exist, and may undulate in this eccentric fashion without outraging the laws of mathematics. I am no mathematician, and I can not judge whether this reconciliation of the action of the ether with mechanical law is to be looked upon as a permanent solution of the question, or is only what diplomatists call a modus vivendi. In any case it leaves our knowledge of the ether in a very rudimentary condition. It has no known qualities except one, and that quality is in the highest degree anomalous and inscrutable. The extended conception which enables us to recognize ethereal waves in the vibrations of electricity has added infinite attraction to the study of those waves, but it carries its own difficulties with it. It is not easy to fit in the theory of electrical ether waves with the phenomena of positive and negative electricity; and as to the true significance and cause of those counter-acting and complementary forces, to which we give the provisional names of negative and positive, we know about as much now as Franklin knew a century and a half ago.
I have selected the elementary atoms and the ether as two instances of the obscurity that still hangs over problems which the highest scientific intellects have been investigating for several generations. A more striking but more obvious instance still is life—animal and vegetable life—the action of an unknown force on ordinary matter. What is the mysterious impulse which is able to strike across the ordinary laws of matter, and twist them for a moment from their path? Some people demur to the use of the term "vital force" to designate this impulse. In their view the existence of such a force is negatived by the fact that chemists have been able by cunning substitutions to produce artificially the peculiar compounds which in Nature are only found in organisms that are or have been living. These compounds are produced by some living organism in the performance of the ordered series of functions proper to its brief career. To counterfeit them—as has been done in numerous cases—does not enable us to do what the vital force alone can effect—to bring the organism itself into existence, and to cause it to run its appointed course of change. This is the unknown force which continues to defy not only our imitation but our scrutiny. Biology has been exceptionally active and successful during the last half century. Its triumphs have been brilliant, and they have been rich enough not only in immediate result but in the promise of future advance. Yet they give at present no hope of penetrating the great central mystery. The progress which has been made in the study of microscopic life has been very striking, whether or not the results which are at present inferred from it can be taken as conclusive. Infinitesimal bodies found upon the roots of plants have the proud office of capturing and taming for us the free nitrogen of the air, which, if we are to live at all, we must consume and assimilate, and yet which, without the help of our microscopic ally, we could not draw for any useful purpose from the ocean of nitrogen in which we live. Microscopic bodies are convicted of causing many of the worst diseases to which flesh is heir, and the guilt of many more will probably be brought home to them in due time; and they exercise a scarcely less sinister or less potent influence on our race by the plagues with which they destroy some of the most valuable fruits of husbandry, such as the potato, the mulberry, and the vine. Almost all their power resides in the capacity of propagating their kind with infinite rapidity, and up to this time science has been more skillful in describing their ravages than in devising means to hinder them. It would be ungrateful not to mention two brilliant exceptions to this criticism. The antiseptic surgery which we owe chiefly to Lister, and the inoculation against anthrax, hydrophobia, and perhaps some other diseases, which we owe to Pasteur, must be recorded as splendid victories over the countless legions of our infinitesimal foes. Results like these are the great glory of the scientific workers of the past century. Men may, perhaps, have overrated the progress of nineteenth-century research in opening the secrets of Nature; but it is difficult to overrate the brilliant service it has rendered in ministering to the comforts and diminishing the sufferings of mankind.
If we are not able to see far into the causes and origin of life in our own day, it is not probable that we shall deal more successfully with the problem as it arose many million years ago. Yet certainly the most conspicuous event in the scientific annals of the last half century has been the publication of Mr. Darwin's work on the Origin of Species, which appeared in 1859. In some respects, in the depth of the impression which it made on scientific thought, and even on the general opinion of the world, its momentous effect can hardly be overstated. But at this distance of time it is possible to see that some of its success has been due to adventitious circumstances. It has had the chance of enlisting among its champions some of the most powerful intellects of our time, and perhaps the still happier fortune of appearing at a moment when it furnished an armory of weapons to men, who were not scientific, for use in the bitter but transitory polemics of the day. But far the largest part of its accidental advantages was to be found in the remarkable character and qualifications of its author. The equity of judgment, the simple-minded love of truth and the patient devotion to the pursuit of it through years of toil and of other conditions the most unpropitious—these things endeared to numbers of men everything that came from Charles Darwin, apart from its scientific merit or literary charm. And whatever final value may be assigned to his doctrine, nothing can ever detract from the luster shed upon it by the wealth of his knowledge and the infinite ingenuity of his resource. The intrinsic power of his theory is shown at least in this one respect, that in the department of knowledge with which it is concerned it has effected an entire revolution in the methods of research. Before his time the study of living Nature had a tendency to be merely statistical; since his time it has become predominantly historical. The consideration how any organic body came to be what it is occupies a far larger area in any inquiry now than the mere description of its actual condition; but this question was not predominant—it may almost be said to have been ignored—in the botanical and zoölogical study of sixty years ago.
Another lasting and unquestioned effect has resulted from Darwin's work. He has, as a matter of fact, disposed of the doctrine of the immutability of species. It has been mainly associated in recent days with the honored name of Agassiz, but with him has disappeared the last defender of it who could claim the attention of the world. Few now are found to doubt that animals separated by differences far exceeding those that distinguished what we know as species have yet descended from common ancestors. But there is much less agreement as to the extent to which this common descent can be assumed, or the process by which it has come about. Darwin himself believed that all animals were descended from "at most four or five progenitors"—adding that "there was grandeur in the view that life had been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or one." Some of his more devoted followers, like Prof. Haeckel, were prepared to go a step further and to contemplate a crystal as the probable ancestor of the whole fauna and flora of this planet.
To this extent the Darwinian theory has not effected the conquest of scientific opinion; and still less is there any unanimity in the acceptance of natural selection as the sole or even the main agent of whatever modifications may have led up to the existing forms of life. The deepest obscurity still hangs over the origin of the infinite variety of life. Two of the strongest objections to the Darwinian explanation appear still to retain all their force.
I think Lord Kelvin was the first to point out that the amount of time required by the advocates of the theory for working out the process they had imagined could not be conceded without assuming the existence of a totally different set of natural laws from those with which we are acquainted. His view was not only based on profound mechanical reasoning, but it was so plain that any layman could comprehend it. Setting aside arguments deduced from the resistance of the tides, which may be taken to transcend the lay understanding, his argument from the refrigeration of the earth requires little science to apprehend it. Everybody knows that hot things cool, and that according to their substance they take more or less time in cooling. It is evident from the increase of heat as we descend into the earth that the earth is cooling, and we know by experiment, within certain wide limits, the rate at which its substances, the matters of which it is constituted, are found to cool. It follows that we can approximately calculate how hot it was so many million years ago. But if at any time it was hotter at the surface by 50° Fahr. than it is now, life would then have been impossible upon the planet, and therefore we can without much difficulty fix a date before which organic life on earth can not have existed. Basing himself on these considerations. Lord Kelvin limited the period of organic life upon the earth to a hundred million years, and Prof. Tait in a still more penurious spirit cut that hundred down to ten. But on the other side of the account stand the claims of the geologists and biologists. They have reveled in the prodigality of the ciphers which they put at the end of the earth's hypothetical life. Long cribbed and cabined within the narrow bounds of the popular chronology, they have exulted wantonly in their new freedom. They have lavished their millions of years with the open hand of a prodigal heir indemnifying himself by present extravagance for the enforced self-denial of his youth. But it can not be gainsaid that their theories require at least all this elbow-room. If we think of that vast distance over which Darwin conducts us from the jellyfish lying on the primeval beach to man as we know him now; if we reflect that the prodigious change requisite to transform one into the other is made up of a chain of generations, each advancing by a minute variation from the form of its predecessor; and if we further reflect that these successive changes are so minute that in the course of our historical period—say three thousand years—this progressive variation has not advanced by a single step perceptible to our eyes, in respect to man or the animals and plants with which man is familiar, we shall admit that for a chain of change so vast, of which the smallest link is longer than our recorded history, the biologists are making no extravagant claim when they demand at least many hundred million years for the accomplishment of the stupendous process. Of course, if the mathematicians are right, the biologists can not have what they demand. If, for the purposes of their theory, organic life must have existed on the globe more than a hundred million years ago, it must, under the temperature then prevailing, have existed in a state of vapor. The jellyfish would have been dissipated in steam long before he had had a chance of displaying the advantageous variation which was to make him the ancestor of the human race. I see, in the eloquent discourse of one of my most recent and most distinguished predecessors in this chair. Sir Archibald Geikie, that the controversy is still alive. The mathematicians sturdily adhere to their figures, and the biologists are quite sure the mathematicians must have made a mistake. I will not get myself into the line of fire by intervening in such a controversy. But until it is adjusted the laity may be excused for returning a verdict of "not proven" upon the wider issues the Darwinian school has raised.
The other objection is best stated in the words of an illustrious disciple of Darwin, who has recently honored this city by his presence—I refer to Prof. Weismann. But in referring to him, I can not but give, in passing, a feeble expression to the universal sorrow with which in this place the news was received that Weismann's distinguished antagonist, Prof, Romanes, had been taken from us in the outset and full promise of a splendid scientific career.
The gravest objection to the doctrine of natural selection was expressed by Weismann in a paper published a few months ago, not as agreeing to the objection, but as resisting it; and therefore his language may be taken as an impartial statement of the difficulty. "We accept natural selection," he says, "not because we are able to demonstrate the process in detail, not even because we can with more or less ease imagine it, but simply because we must—because it is the only possible explanation that we can conceive. We must assume natural selection to be the principle of the explanation of the metamorphoses, because all other apparent principles of explanation fail us, and it is inconceivable that there could yet be another capable of explaining the adaptation of organisms without assuming the help of a principle of design,"
There is the difficulty. We can not demonstrate the process of natural selection in detail; we can not even, with more or less ease, imagine it. It is purely hypothetical. No man, so far as we know, has ever seen it at work. An accidental variation may have been perpetuated by inheritance, and in the struggle for existence the bearer of it may have replaced, by virtue of the survival of the fittest, his less improved competitors; but, as far as we know, no man or succession of men have ever observed the whole process in any single case, and certainly no man has recorded the observation. Variation by artificial selection, of course, we know very well; but the intervention of the cattle breeder and the pigeon fancier is the essence of artificial selection. It is effected by their action in crossing, by their skill in bringing the right mates together to produce the progeniture they want. But in natural selection who is to supply the breeder's place? Unless the crossing is properly arranged, the new breed will never come into being. What is to secure that the two individuals of opposite sexes in the primeval forest, who had been both accidentally blessed with the same advantageous variation, shall meet, and transmit by inheritance that variation to their successors? Unless this step is made good, the modification will never get a start; and yet there is nothing to insure that step, except pure chance. The law of chances takes the place of the cattle breeder and the pigeon fancier. The biologists do well to ask for an immeasurable expanse of time. if the occasional meetings of advantageously varied couples from age to age are to provide the pedigree of modifications which unite us to our ancestor the jellyfish. Of course the struggle for existence, and the survival of the fittest, would in the long run secure the predominance of the stronger breed over the weaker. But it would be of no use in setting the improved breed going. There would not be time. No possible variation which is known to our experience, in the short time that elapses in a single life between the moment of maturity and the age of reproduction, could enable the varied individual to clear the field of all competitors, either by slaughtering or starving them out. But unless the struggle for existence took this summary and internecine character, there would be nothing but mere chance to secure that the advantageously varied bridegroom at one end of the wood should meet the bride who by a happy contingency had been advantageously varied in the same direction at the same time at the other end of the wood. It would be a mere chance if they ever knew of each other's existence—a still more unlikely chance that they should resist on both sides all temptations to a less advantageous alliance. But unless they did so, the new breed would never even begin, let alone the question of its perpetuation after it had begun. I think Prof. Weismann is justified in saying that we can not, either with more or less ease, imagine the process of natural selection.
It seems strange that a philosopher of Prof. Weismann's penetration should accept as established a hypothetical process the truth of which he admits that he can not demonstrate in detail, and the operation of which he can not even imagine. The reason that he gives seems to me instructive of the great danger scientific research is running at the present time—the acceptance of mere conjecture in the name and place of knowledge, in preference to making frankly the admission that no certain knowledge can be attained. "We accept natural selection," he says, "because we must—because it is the only possible explanation that we can conceive." As a politician, I know that argument very well. In political controversy it is sometimes said of a disputed proposal that it "holds the field," that it must be accepted because no possible alternative has been suggested. In politics there is occasionally a certain validity in the argument, for it sometimes happens that some definite course must be taken, even though no course is free from objection. But such a line of reasoning is utterly out of place in science. We are under no obligation to find a theory, if the facts will not provide a sound one. To the riddles which Nature propounds to us the profession of ignorance must constantly be our only reasonable answer. The cloud of impenetrable mystery hangs over the development and still more over the origin of life. If we strain our eyes to pierce it, with the foregone conclusion that some solution is and must be attainable, we shall only mistake for discoveries the figments of our own imagination. Prof. Weismann adds another reason for his belief in natural selection, which is certainly characteristic of the time in which we live. "It is inconceivable," he says, "that there should be another principle capable of explaining the adaptation of organisms without assuming the help of a principle of design." The whirligig of time assuredly brings its revenges. Time was, not very long ago, when the belief in creative design was supreme. Even those who were sapping its authority were wont to pay it a formal homage, fearing to shock the public conscience by denying it. Now the revolution is so complete that a great philosopher uses it as a reductio ad absurdum, and prefers to believe that which can neither be demonstrated in detail nor imagined, rather than run the slightest risk of such a heresy.
I quite accept the professor's dictum that if natural selection is rejected we have no resource but to fall back on the mediate or immediate agency of a principle of design. In Oxford, at least, he will not find that argument is conclusive, nor, I believe, among scientific men in this country generally, however imposing the names of some whom he may claim for that belief. I would rather lean to the conviction that the multiplying difficulties of the mechanical theory are weakening the influence it once had acquired. I prefer to shelter myself in this matter behind the judgment of the greatest living master of natural science among us, Lord Kelvin, and to quote as my own concluding words the striking language with which he closed his address from this chair more than twenty years ago. "I have always felt," he said, "that the hypothesis of natural selection does not contain the true theory of evolution, if evolution there has been in biology‥‥I feel profoundly convinced that the argument of design has been greatly too much lost sight of in recent zoölogical speculations. Overpoweringly strong proofs of intelligent and benevolent design lie around us, and if ever perplexities, whether metaphysical or scientific, turn us away from them for a time, they come back upon us with irresistible force, showing to us through Nature the influence of a free will, and teaching us that all living things depend on one everlasting Creator and Ruler."
Last year, Garden and Forest says, the Genesee Valley Forestry Association of Rochester, N.Y., offered prizes to the children of the public schools for gathering the cocoons of caterpillars, and had encouraging success. This year, in addition to the other prizes, a special prize of ten dollars was offered to all who would bring a larger number than was brought in 1893 by any one pupil (44,900). Sixty-five pupils gained and received this prize, and five dollars each were given to the two boys who had the largest count. Eight million, eight hundred thousand and two hundred cocoons were gathered, and the city was relieved of that number of destroyers of vegetation and nuisances.
Prizes are offered by the Revue Suisse de Photographie, Geneva, for the best photograph of a falling drop of water. The drops are to be of distilled water, issuing from a tube, the internal and external diameters of which are measured, with no special conditions as to the size of the picture, but with preferences for something near the natural size. Three prizes of medals will be given and three honorable mentions.
- ↑ Inaugural Address of the President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.