not affect
the security of their conclusions. But in men of lower rank, mental
defects in language indicate fatal flaws in thought. And although
the constant habit to which I owe my (often foolishly praised)
"command of language"--of never allowing a sentence to pass proof
in which I have not considered whether, for the vital word in it, a
better could be found in the dictionary, makes me somewhat morbidly
intolerant of careless diction, it may be taken for an extremely
useful and practical rule, that if a man can think clearly he will
write well, and that no good science was ever written in bad
English. So that, before you consider whether a scientific author
says a true or a false thing, you had better first look if he is
able properly to say _any_thing,--and secondly, whether his conceit
permits him to say anything properly.

Thus, when Professor Tyndall, endeavoring to write poetically of
the sun, tells you that "The Lilies of the field are his
workmanship," you may observe, first, that since the sun is not a
man, nothing that he does is workmanship; while even the figurative
statement that he rejoices _as_ a strong man to run his course, is
one which Professor Tyndall has no intention whatever of admitting.
And you may then observe, in the second place, that, if even in
that figurative sense, the lilies of the field are the sun's
workmanship, in the same sense the lilies of the hothouse are the
stove's workmanship,--and in perfectly logical parallel, you, who
are alive here to listen to me, because you have been warmed and
fed through the winter, are the workmanship of your own
coal-scuttles.

Again, when Mr. Balfour Stewart begins a treatise on the
'Conservation of Energy,' which is to conclude, as we shall see
presently, with the prophecy of its total extinction as far as the
present world is concerned,--by clothing in a "properly scientific
garb," our innocent impression that there is some difference
between the blow of a rifle stock and a rifle ball; he prepares for
the scientific toilet by telling us in italics that "the something
which the rifle ball possesses in contradistinction to the rifle
stock is clearly the power of overcoming resistance," since "it can
penetrate through oak-wood or through water--or (alas! that it
should be so often tried) through the human body; and _this power
of penetration_" (italics now mine) "_is the distinguishing
characteristic of a substance moving with very great velocit