Part 5

Nothing reveals the unfortunate break in Humanities more clearly than the treatment of the greatest nature-poet in literature, a man who had "gazed on Nature's naked loveliness" unabashed, the man who united, as no one else has ever done, the "functions and temper and achievement of science and poetry" (Herford). The golden work of Lucretius is indeed recognized, and in Honour Moderations, Books I to III and V are set as one of seven alternatives in section D; and scattered through the "Greats" papers are set translations and snippets here and there; but anything like adequate consideration from the scientific side is to be sought in vain. Unmatched among the ancients or moderns is the vision by Lucretius of continuity in the workings of Nature--not less of le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis which so affrighted Pascal, than of "the long, limitless age of days, the age of all time that has gone by"--

"... longa diei infinita ætas anteacti temporis omnis."

And it is in a Latin poet that we find up-to-date views of the origin of the world and of the origin of man. The description of the wild discordant storm of atoms (Book V) which led to the birth of the world might be transferred verbatim to the accounts of Poincaré or of Arrhenius of the growth of new celestial bodies in the Milky Way. What an insight into primitive man and the beginnings of civilization! He might have been a contemporary and friend, and doubtless was a tutor, of Tylor. Book II, a manual of atomic physics with its marvellous conception of

"... the flaring atom streams And torrents of her myriad universe,"

can only be read appreciatively by pupils of Roentgen or of J. J. Thomson. The ring theory of magnetism advanced in Book VI has been reproduced of late by Parsons, whose magnetons rotating as rings at high speed have the form and effect with which this disciple of Democritus clothes his magnetic physics.

And may I here enter a protest? Of love-philtres that produce insanity we may read the truth in a chapter of that most pleasant manual of erotology, the "Anatomy of Melancholy." Of insanity of any type that leaves a mind capable in lucid intervals of writing such verses as "De Rerum Natura" we know nothing. The sole value of the myth is its causal association with the poem of Tennyson. Only exsuccous dons who have never known the wiles and ways of the younger Aphrodite would take the intensity of the feeling in Book IV as witness to anything but an accident which may happen to the wisest of the wise, when enthralled by Vivien or some dark lady of the Sonnets!

In the School of Literæ Humaniores the studies are based on classical literature and on history, "but a large number of students approach philosophical study from other sides. Students of such subjects as mathematics, natural science, history, psychology, anthropology, or political economy become naturally interested in philosophy, and their needs are at present very imperfectly provided for in this university." This I quote from a Report to the Board of the Faculty of Arts made just before the war on a proposed new Honour School, the subject of which should be the principles of philosophy considered in their relation to the sciences. That joint action of this kind should have been taken by the Boards of Arts and of Science indicates a widespread conviction that no man is cultivated up to the standard of his generation who has not an appreciation of how the greatest achievements of the human mind have been reached; and the practical question is how to introduce such studies into the course of liberal education, how to give the science school the leaven of an old philosophy, how to leaven the old philosophical school with the thoughts of science.

Since I wrote this lecture, Professor J. A. Stewart has sent me his just-published essay on Oxford after the War and a Liberal Education, in which he urges with all the weight of his learning and experience that the foundations of liberal education in Oxford should be "No Humane Letters without Natural Science and no Natural Science without Humane Letters."

It is important to recognize that there is nothing mysterious in the method of science, or apart from the ordinary routine of life. Science has been defined as the habit or faculty of observation. By such the child grows in knowledge, and in its daily exercise an adult lives and moves. Only a quantitative difference makes observation scientific--accuracy; in that way alone do we discover things as they really are. This is the essence of Plato's definition of science as "the discovery of things as they really are," whether in the heavens above, in the earth beneath, or in the observer himself. As a mental operation, the scientific method is equally applicable to deciphering a bit of Beneventan script, to the analysis of the evidence of the Commission on Coal-Mines, a study of the mechanism of the nose-dive, or of the colour-scheme in tiger-beetles. To observation and reasoned thought, the Greek added experiment, but never fully used it in biology, an instrument which has made science productive, and to which the modern world owes its civilization. Our every-day existence depends on the practical application of discoveries in pure science by men who had no other motives than a search for knowledge of Nature's laws, a disinterestedness which Burnet claims to be the distinctive gift of Hellas to humanity. With the discovery of induced currents Faraday had no thought of the dynamo. Crookes's tubes were a plaything until Roentgen turned them into practical use with the X-rays. Perkin had no thought of transforming chemical industry when he discovered aniline dyes. Priestley would have cursed the observation that an electrical charge produced nitrous acid had he foreseen that it would enable Germany to prolong the war, but he would have blessed the thought that it may make us independent of all outside sources for fertilizers.

The extraordinary development of modern science may be her undoing. Specialism, now a necessity, has fragmented the specialities themselves in a way that makes the outlook hazardous. The workers lose all sense of proportion in a maze of minutiæ. Everywhere men are in small coteries intensely absorbed in subjects of deep interest, but of very limited scope. Chemistry, a century ago an appanage of the Chair of Medicine or even of Divinity, has now a dozen departments, each with its laboratory and literature, sometimes its own society. Applying themselves early to research, young men get into backwaters far from the main stream. They quickly lose the sense of proportion, become hypercritical, and the smaller the field, the greater the tendency to megalocephaly. The study for fourteen years of the variations in the colour-scheme of the thirteen hundred species of tiger-beetles scattered over the earth may sterilize a man into a sticker of pins and a paster of labels; on the other hand, he may be a modern biologist whose interest is in the experimental modification of types, and in the mysterious insulation of hereditary characters from the environment. Only in one direction does the modern specialist acknowledge his debt to the dead languages. Men of science pay homage, as do no others, to the god of words whose magic power is nowhere so manifest as in the plastic language of Greece. The only visit many students pay to Parnassus is to get an intelligible label for a fact or form newly discovered. Turn the pages of such a dictionary of chemical terms as Morley and Muir, and you meet in close-set columns countless names unknown a decade ago, and unintelligible to the specialist in another department unless familiar with Greek, and as meaningless as the Arabic jargon in such mediæval collections as the "Synonyma" of Simon Januensis or the "Pandects" of Matheas Sylvaticus. As "Punch" put it the other day in a delightful poetical review of Professor West's volume:

"Botany relies on Latin ever since Linnæus' days; Biologic nomenclature draws on Greek in countless ways; While in Medicine it is obvious you can never take your oath What an ailment means exactly if you haven't studied both."

The Value of the Classics. Princeton University Press, 1917.

Let me give a couple of examples.

Within the narrow compass of the primitive cell from which all living beings originate, onomatomania runs riot. The process of mitosis has developed a special literature and language. Dealing not alone with the problems of heredity and of sex, but with the very dynamics of life, the mitotic complex is much more than a simple physiological process, and in the action and interaction of physical forces the cytologist hopes to find the key to the secret of life itself. And what a Grecian he has become! Listen to this account, which Aristotle would understand much better than most of us.

The karyogranulomes, not the idiogranulomes or microsomenstratum in the protoplasm of the spermatogonia, unite into the idiosphærosome, acrosoma of Lenhossék, a protean phase, as the idiosphærosome differentiates into an idiocryptosome and an idiocalyptosome, both surrounded by the idiosphærotheca, the archoplasmic vesicle; but the idioectosome disappears in the metamorphosis of the spermatid into a sphere, the idiophtharosome. The separation of the calyptosome from the cryptosome antedates the transformation of the idiosphærotheca into the spermiocalyptrotheca.

Of course I have made this up out of a recent number of the American Journal of Anatomy, 24, I.

Or take a more practical if less Cratylean example. In our precious cabbage-patches the holometabolous insecta are the hosts of parasitic polyembryonic hymenoptera, upon the prevalence of which rests the psychic and somatic stamina of our fellow countrymen; for the larvæ of Pieris brassicæ, vulgarly cabbage butterfly, are parasitiased by the Apantales glomeratus, which in turn has a hyperparasite, the Mesochorus pallidus. It is tragic to think that the fate of a plant, the dietetic and pharmaceutical virtues of which have been so extolled by Cato, and upon which two of my Plinean colleagues of uncertain date, Chrysippus and Dieuches, wrote monographs--it fills one with terror to think that a crop so dear to Hodge (et veris cymata! the Brussels sprouts of Columella) should depend on the deposition in the ovum of the Pieris of another polyembryonic egg. The cytoplasm or oöplasm of this forms a trophoamnion and develops into a polygerminal mass, a spherical morula, from which in turn develop a hundred or more larvæ, which immediately proceed to eat up everything in and of the body of their host. Only in this way does Nature preserve the Selenas, the Leas, and the Crambes, so dear to Cato and so necessary for the sustenance of our hard-working, brawny-armed Brasserii.

From over-specialization scientific men are in a more parlous state than are the Humanists from neglect of classical tradition. The salvation of science lies in a recognition of a new philosophy--the scientia scientiarum of which Plato speaks. "Now when all these studies reach the point of intercommunion and connection with one another and come to be considered in their mutual affinities, then, I think, and not till then, will the pursuit of them have a value." Upon this synthetic process I hesitate to dwell; since, like Dr. Johnson's friend, Oliver Edwards, I have never succeeded in mastering philosophy--cheerfulness was always breaking in.

In the proposed Honour School the principles of philosophy are to be dealt with in relation to the sciences, and by the introduction of literary and historical studies, which George Sarton advocates so warmly as the new Humanism, the student will gain a knowledge of the evolution of modern scientific thought. But to limit the history to the modern period--Kepler to the present time is suggested--would be a grave error. The scientific student should go to the sources and in some way be taught the connection of Democritus with Dalton, of Archimedes with Kelvin, of Aristarchus with Newton, of Galen with John Hunter, and of Plato and Aristotle with them all. And the glories of Greek science should be opened in a sympathetic way to "Greats" men. Under new regulations at the public schools, a boy of sixteen or seventeen should have enough science to appreciate the position of Theophrastus in botany, and perhaps himself construct Hero's fountain. Science will take a totally different position in this country when the knowledge of its advances is the possession of all educated men. The time, too, is ripe for the Bodleian to become a studium generale, with ten or more departments, each in charge of a special sub-librarian. When the beautiful rooms, over the portals of which are the mocking blue and gold inscriptions, are once more alive with students, the task of teaching subjects on historical lines will be greatly lightened. What has been done with the Music-Room, and with the Science-Room through the liberality of Dr. and Mrs. Singer, should be done for classics, history, literature, theology, etc., each section in charge of a sub-librarian who will be Doctor perplexorum alike to professor, don, and undergraduate.

Popular Science Monthly, September, 1918, and Scientia, XXIII, 3.

I wish time had permitted me to sketch even briefly the story of the evolution of science in this old seat of learning. A fortunate opportunity enables you to see two phases in its evolution. Through the kind permission of several of the colleges, particularly Christ Church, Merton, St. John's, and Oriel, and with the coöperation of the Curators of the Bodleian and Dr. Cowley, Mr. R. T. Gunther, of Magdalen College, has arranged a loan exhibition of the early scientific instruments and manuscripts. A series of quadrants and astrolabes show how Arabian instruments, themselves retaining much of the older Greek models, have translated Alexandrian science into the Western world. Some were constructed for the latitude of Oxford, and one was associated with our astronomer-poet Chaucer.

For the first time the instruments and works of the early members of the Merton School of astronomer-physicians have been brought together. They belong to a group of men of the fourteenth century--Reed, Aschenden, Simon Bredon, Merle, Richard of Wallingford, and others--whose labours made Oxford the leading scientific university of the world.

Little remains of the scientific apparatus of the early period of the Royal Society, but through the kindness of the Dean and Governing Body of Christ Church, the entire contents of the cabinet of philosophical apparatus of the Earl of Orrery, who flourished some thirty years after the foundation of the Society, is on exhibit, and the actual astronomical model, the "Orrery," made for him and called after his name.

Among other notable exhibits there are:

1. A series of astronomical volvelles in manuscripts and printed books.

2. The printed evidence that Leonard Digges of University College was the inventor of the telescope many years before Galileo.

3. The mathematical work of Robert Recorde of All Souls' College, in which he suggested the St. Andrew's Cross as the sign of multiplication, and uses symbols +, -, =.

4. The earliest known slide-rule in a circular form, recently discovered in St. John's College.