ics," says the late Monsignor Benson in one of his
letters, "though one certainly loses the liberty of doing sums wrong or
doing them by laborious methods!"

Before setting out upon any research, the careful man of science sets
himself to study "the literature of the subject" as he calls it. He
delves into all sorts of out-of-the-way periodicals to ascertain what
such a man has written upon such a point. All this he does in order that
he may avoid doing a piece of work over again unnecessarily:
_unnecessarily_, for it maybe actually necessary to repeat it, if it is
of very great importance and if it has not been repeated and verified by
other observers. Further, he delves into this literature because it is
thus that he hopes to avoid the many blind alleys which branch off from
every path of research, delude their explorer with vain hopes and
finally bring him face to face with a blank wall. In a word the inquirer
consults his authorities and when he finds them worthy of reliance, he
limits his freedom by paying attention to them. He does not say: "How am
I held in bondage by this assertion that the earth goes round the sun,"
but accepting that fact, he rejects such of his conclusions as are
obviously irreconcilable with it. Surely this is plain common sense and
the man who acted otherwise would be setting himself a quite impossible
task. It is the weakness of the "heuristic method" that it sets its
pupils to find out things which many abler men have spent years in
investigating. The man who sets out to make a research, without first
ascertaining what others have done in that direction, proposes to
accumulate in himself the abilities and the life-work of all previous
generations of labourers in that corner of the scientific vineyard.

There is a somewhat amusing and certainly interesting instance of this
which will bear quotation. The late Mr. Grant Allen, who knew something
of quite a number of subjects though perhaps not very much about any of
them, devoted most of his time and energies (outside his stories, some
of which are quite entertaining) to not always very accurate essays in
natural history. One day, however, his evil genius prompted him to write
and, worse still, to publish a book entitled _Force and Energy: A Theory
of Dynamics_, in which he purported to deal with a matter of which he
knew far less even than he did about animated nature. Mark the
inevitable result! A copy of the book was forwarded to the jour