tous expectations.

When, however, having created in their readers' minds an unreasonable
sense of failure and a mistrust of science, such writers go on to make
use of the want of confidence thus produced, in order to throw doubt
upon the real conquests of science--the new knowledge actually made
and established by the investigators of the last century--it becomes
necessary to say a little more. The public is told by these false
witnesses that science has "dogmas," and that men of science are less
satisfied than they were with the "dogmas" of the last century.
Science has no dogmas; all its conclusions are open to revision by
experiment and demonstration, and are continually so revised. But
science takes no heed of empty assertion unaccompanied by evidence
which can be weighed and measured. "_Nullius in verba_" is the motto
of one of the most famous Societies for the promotion of the knowledge
of nature--the Royal Society of London.

It is especially in the area of biology--the knowledge of living
things--that the enemies of science make their most audacious
attempts to discredit well-ascertained facts and conclusions. They
tell their readers that those greater problems of the science (as they
erroneously term them), such as the nature of variation among
individuals, the laws of heredity, the nature of growth and
reproduction, the peculiarities of sex, the characteristics of habits,
instinct, and intelligence, and the meaning of life itself, have
advanced very little beyond the standpoint of the first and greatest
biologist, Aristotle. This statement is vague and indefinite; the
conclusion which it suggests is absolutely untrue. Aristotle knew next
to nothing about the mechanism of the processes in living things above
cited. At the present day we know an enormous amount about it in
detail. But when men of science are told that they do not know the
"nature" of this and the "meaning" of that, they frankly admit that
they do not know the real "nature" (for the expression is capable of
endless variety of significance) of anything nor the real "meaning"
not only of life, but of the existence of the universe, and they say,
moreover, that they have no intention or expectation of knowing the
ultimate "nature" or the ultimate "meaning" (in a philosophical sense)
of any such things. These are not problems of science--and it is
misleading and injurious to pretend that they are.

I recently read an essay in which the writer is g