nal
_Nature_, and sent by its editor to be dealt with by the competent hands
of Sir Oliver (then Professor) Lodge.[27]

This is how that eminent authority dealt with it. "There exists a
certain class of mind," he commences, "allied perhaps to the Greek
sophist variety, to which ignorance of a subject offers no sufficient
obstacle to the composition of a treatise upon it." It may be rash to
suggest that this type of mind is well developed in philosophers of the
Spencerian school, though it would be possible to adduce some evidence
in support of such a suggestion. "In the volume before us," he
continues, "Mr. Grant Allen sets to work to reconstruct the fundamental
science of dynamics, an edifice which, since the time of Galileo and
Newton, has been standing on what has seemed a fairly secure and
substantial basis, but which he seems to think it is now time to
demolish in order to make room for a newly excogitated theory. The
attempt is audacious and the result--what might have been expected. The
performance lends itself indeed to the most scathing criticism; blunders
and misstatements abound on nearly every page, and the whole thing is
simply an emanation of mental fog." It would occupy too much space to
reproduce this criticism with any fullness, but one or two points
exceedingly germane to our subject can hardly go without notice.
Alluding to a certain question, which seems to have greatly bothered Mr.
Allen and likewise Mr. Clodd, who, it would appear, was associated with
him in this performance, the reviewer says: "The puzzle was solved
completely long ago, in the clearest possible manner, and the
'_Principia_' is the witness to it; but it is still felt to be a
difficulty by beginners, and I suppose there is no offence in applying
this harmless epithet to both Mr. Grant Allen and Mr. Clodd, so far as
the truths of dynamics and physics are concerned." One last quotation:
"The thing which strikes one most forcibly about the physics of these
paper philosophers is the extraordinary contempt which, if they are
consistent, they must or ought to feel for men of science. If Newton,
Lagrange, Gauss, and Thompson, to say nothing of smaller men, have
muddled away their brains in concocting a scheme of dynamics wherein the
very definitions are all wrong; if they have arrived at a law of
conservation of energy without knowing what the word energy means, or
how to define it; if they have to be set right by an amateur who has
devot