ive power, like Newton or Darwin. But we who stand at
the threshold of the scientific era are perhaps too near the light, and
too much dazzled by the results of scientific discovery to say who is
great and who is not great. I have met several distinguished men of
science, and I have thought some of them to be men of obviously
high intellectual gifts, and some of them men of inert and secretive
temperaments. But that is only natural, for to be great in other
departments generally implies a certain knowledge of the world, or at
all events of the thought of the world; whereas the great man of
science may be moving in regions of thought that may be absolutely
incommunicable to the ordinary person. But I do not suppose that
scientific greatness is a thing which can be measured by the importance
of the practical results of a discovery. I mean that a man may hit upon
some process, or some treatment of disease, which may be of incalculable
benefit to humanity, and yet not be really a great man of science, only
a fortunate discoverer, and incidentally a great benefactor to humanity.
The unknown discoverers of things like the screw or the wheel, persons
lost in the mists of antiquity, could not, I suppose, be ranked as great
men of science. The great man of science is the man who can draw
some stupendous inference, which revolutionises thought and sets men
hopefully at work on some problem which does not so much add to the
convenience of humanity as define the laws of nature. We are still
surrounded by innumerable and awful mysteries of life and being; the
evidence which will lead to their solution is probably in our hands and
plain enough, if any one could but see the bearing of facts which are
known to the simplest child. There is little doubt, I suppose, that
the greatest reputations of recent years have been made in science; and
perhaps when our present age has globed itself into a cycle, we shall be
amazed at the complaint that the present era is lacking in great men. We
are busy in looking for greatness in so many directions, and we are apt
to suppose, from long use, that greatness is so inseparably connected
with some form of human expression, whether it be the utterance of
thought, or the marshalling of armies, that we may be overlooking a more
stable form of greatness, which will be patent to those that come
after. My own belief is that the condition of science at the present day
answers best to the conditions which we hav