I have not gone far for my facts, nor yet far from them; all on which I
rest are as open to the reader as to me. If I have sometimes used hard
terms, the probability is that I have not understood them, but have done
so by a slip, as one who has caught a bad habit from the company he has
been lately keeping. They should be skipped.
Do not let the reader be too much cast down by the bad language with
which professional scientists obscure the issue, nor by their seeming to
make it their business to fog us under the pretext of removing our
difficulties. It is not the ratcatcher's interest to catch all the rats;
and, as Handel observed so sensibly, "Every professional gentleman must
do his best for to live." The art of some of our philosophers, however,
is sufficiently transparent, and consists too often in saying "organism
which . . . must be classified among fishes," {220a} instead of "fish"
and then proclaiming that they have "an ineradicable tendency to try to
make things clear." {220b}
If another example is required, here is the following from an article
than which I have seen few with which I more completely agree, or which
have given me greater pleasure. If our men of science would take to
writing in this way, we should be glad enough to follow them. The
passage I refer to runs thus:--
"Professor Huxley speaks of a 'verbal fog by which the question at
issue may be hidden;' is there no verbal fog in the statement that
_the aetiology of crayfishes resolves itself into a gradual evolution
in the course of the mesozoic and subsequent epochs of the world's
history of these animals from a primitive astacomorphous form_? Would
it be fog or light that would envelop the history of man if we say
that the existence of man was explained by the hypothesis of his
gradual evolution from a primitive anthropomorphous form? I should
call this fog, not light.
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