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.It is time to get onto another siding, though, or we may find ourselves in dark places.I wish Science would try and make up her mind as to what is and what is not true.I object to the scientific bully with his mouth full of figures and statistics, who reeks with contempt if he finds that you believe in the theory of yesterday and yet is ready to commit assault and battery upon you if you hint that his explanation of today may not be absolutely final.Couldn’t our scientific friends draw up two tables, one of what they know for certain and the other of what is open to question? I am afraid the printer wouldn’t have a very big job in striking off the first, though he might exhaust his stock of paper over the other.I don’t care about taking a tenant into my brain, and then just when he is snugly settled down, finding him to be worthless and having to evict him.87Now take the sun for example.88 Ever since I first took to milk I have had it driven into me that the sun was an enormous mass of burning matter, which warmed us just as any other great fire would do.When I grew up I read voluminous scientific treatises which reasserted and confirmed the teachings of the nursery.Have I not committed to memory the weight of the sun, and the amount of fuel which that weight represents, and how long it will last, and what will happen when it snuffs out – together with gorgeous descriptions of incandescent hydrogen and molten helium and other such madness? What details have I not collected together, and docketed and stored away in the pigeon-holes of my memory to the exclusion of other matter? And what is the end of it all? Why, the other day, happening to babble some of this information to a friend well posted in modern science, he looked at me with as much interest as if I were a Calopterus gracilis or some other curious fossil.‘There are still people alive then,’ said he, ‘who believe that the sun is on fire.’ ‘I always thought so,’ said I, feeling particularly small.‘My dear fellow,’ he observed compassionately, ‘it is a vulgar error which has exploded some time ago.If it were on fire, where are the stokers who trim it so carefully that it never blazes too much or too little – more on this side or on that? Where are the ashes produced by such a combustion? Where is the oxygen to feed the flame? Where is the—’ ‘But where does the heat come from?’ I cried.‘Why, it is generally supposed by advanced scientists to arise from an electrical influence which the sun exercises upon our atmosphere.A galvanic battery will heat a wire at a distance but does not become hot itself.It’s the same with the sun.The heat of a fire won’t pass through glass and the heat of the sun will.That shows that they are entirely different.Don’t let anyone know that you thought the sun was on fire or they’ll wonder where you have been shut up all this time.’ ‘It’s a mean fraud,’ said I indignantly.‘Here have I been reckoning up how many billion tons of fuel there are left, and bustling round to do what I could to keep it alight, and waking up at night in a fright for fear it should want looking after, and now it turns out that, as like as not, it is a glittering iceberg.’ It shook my confidence in the solar system.I have never felt the same towards the sun since, and I never will again.Seriously though, if Science were a little more modest and less dogmatic she would not expose her humble followers to such shocks as the above.We cannot all have Lord Rosse’s telescopes in our garrets and verify every observation for ourselves.89 If savants tell us that a point is settled, we forthwith absorb it into systems, and we feel ill-used when, in the course of a few years, we have to disgorge it again.We stand on a very narrow basis of ascertained fact, with vast untouched sciences looming upon us through the darkness.Look at electricity with its vast possibilities; magnetism an inexplicable phenomenon which dominates all nature and is as universal as gravity; mesmerism with its suggestions of a sixth sense which may be developing in the human race.In each of these subjects there is a field for tyro Newtons.What is light and what is heat? What is the subtle elastic medium which pervades all space and which conducts light without being itself illuminated? Are there many unknown elements, or are those which we acknowledge capable of being resolved into a very few, which form the original clay out of which Nature manufactured her bricks? When the human race has solved all these problems, they will still be only nibbling at the borders of knowledge.Our accurate information about the intimate organisation of our own human bodies is pitifully small when one thinks of the immense amount of labour which has been expended over it.Physiology is a science which is richer in polysyllables than in facts.Our learned professors can tell us occasionally what an organ is made for, and even make some guess at how it acts, but what satisfaction can he give us as to the motive power? The most ordinary phenomena of life are sealed books to us, however much we may mask our ignorance by sonorous words and solemn countenances
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