in to be read before some scientific society, if Darwin
considered it worthy. And this paper was read on the evening of July
First, before the Linnaeus Society, with one by Darwin on the same
subject, written before Wallace's paper arrived, wherein the identical
views are set forth. Darwin and Wallace expressed what many other
investigators had guessed or but dimly perceived.

* * * * *

Of the six immortal modern scientists, three began life working as
surveyors and civil engineers--Wallace, Tyndall, Spencer. From the
number of eminent men, not forgetting Henry Thoreau, Leonardo da Vinci,
Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Washington--aye! nor old John Brown, who
carried a Gunter's chain and manipulated the transit--we come to the
conclusion that there must be something in the business of surveying
that conduces to clear thinking and strong, independent action.

If I had a boy who by nature and habit was given to futilities, I would
apprentice him to a civil engineer.

When two gangs of men begin a tunnel, working toward each other from
different sides of a mountain, dreams, poetry, hypothesis and guesswork
had better be omitted from the equation. Here is a case where
metaphysics has no bearing. It is a condition that confronts them, not a
theory.

Theological explanations are assumptions built upon hypotheses, and your
theologian always insists that you shall be dead before you can know.

If a bridge breaks down or a fireproof building burns to ashes, no
explanation on the part of the architect can explain away the
miscalculation; but your theologian always evolves his own fog, into
which he can withdraw at will, thus making escape easy. Darwin, Huxley,
Spencer, Tyndall and Wallace all had the mathematical mind. Nothing but
the truth would satisfy them. In school, you remember how we sometimes
used to work on a mathematical problem for hours or days. Many would
give it up. A few of the class would take the answer from the book, and
in an extremity force the figures to give the proper result. Such
students, it is needless to say, never gained the respect of either
class or teacher--or themselves. They had the true theological instinct.
But a few kept on until the problem was solved, or the fallacy of it had
been discovered. In life's school such were the men just named, and the
distinguishing feature of their lives was that they were students and
learners to the last.

Of this group of sc