anesthesia, boasted of getting union by first intention, and were in
many ways doing better work than their colleagues of 1870, Professor
Draper's own time, before Lister's great discovery. Of all this
Professor Draper had no inkling.

Draper's position is very like that of the specialist at all times.
Dean West of Princeton once said, I believe, that a specialist is a
man who knows so much more about one thing than he knows about
anything else that he is inclined to think that he knows more about
that than anyone else does. To which I once ventured {518} to add that
the specialist is also a man who thinks because of his recognized
attainments in one line, that if, for any reason, he should pay any
serious attention to any other subject he would know more about that
than anyone else does. Draper's views on universal history correspond
exactly to such a definition. He jumped to conclusions in a way that
he would surely have resented most bitterly and quite properly in
anyone who attempted after slight acquaintance with his own department
of science to express ultimate conclusions with regard to it, but he
himself with the most scanty information gleaned only for the purpose
of confirming some preconceived ideas, gathered entirely from
secondary authorities without even an attempt to confirm his views by
consultation of original documents, proceeded to tell the world just
what it ought to think about questions of all kinds that have
sometimes occupied historians for centuries and are by no means clear
even yet.

Above all, he failed to realize the relations of whatever knowledge he
had to the other facts of history. Deeply interested in science
himself to the exclusion of nearly everything else, he could not
understand how any generation and scarcely how any individual could
live a deeply intellectual life without an absorbing interest in
physical science. He seems to have had no conception of the fact that
physical science is only a passing phase of man's interest, and that
interests in philosophy, in art, in poetry, in literature are not only
quite equal to science as a mental discipline, but must probably be
considered to surpass it. Nothing can be so narrow as physical science
pursued alone,--as Draper himself furnishes the best possible proof,
but of this he seems to have had no hint. Fortunately humanity has
drawn away from that exaggerated idea of the value of physical science
as ultimate truth and we are able to