vy, and says they are not
facts at all, but the merest fiction. Then I cry aloud with my old
friend Cicero, _Ubinam gentium sumus_, which, being translated in the
language of the boys, means, "Where in the world (or nation) are we
at?" They are actually trying to reform my spelling. I do wish
these reformers had come around sooner, when I was learning to spell
_phthisic_, _syzygy_, _daguerreotype_, and _caoutchouc_. They might
have saved me a deal of trouble and helped me over some of the high
places at the old-fashioned spelling-bees.

I have a friend who is quite versed in science, and he tells me that
any book on science that is more than ten years old is obsolete.
Now, that puzzles me no little. If that is true, why don't they wait
till matters scientific are settled, and then write their books? Why
write a book at all when you know that day after tomorrow some one
will come along and refute all the theories and mangle the facts?
These science chaps must spend a great deal of their time changing
their intellectual clothing. It would be great fun to come back a
hundred years from now and read the books on science, psychology, and
pedagogy. I suppose the books we have now will seem like joke books
to our great-grandchildren, if people are compelled to change their
mental garments every day from now on. I wonder how long it will
take us human coral insects, to get our building up to the top of the
water.

Whoever it was that said that consistency is a jewel would need to
take treatment for his eyes in these days. If I must change my
mental garb each day I don't see how I can be consistent. If I said
yesterday that some theory of science is the truth, the whole truth,
and nothing but the truth, and then find a revision of the statement
necessary to-day, I certainly am inconsistent. This jewel of
consistency certainly loses its lustre, if not its identity, in such
a process of shifting. I do hope these chameleon artists will leave
us the multiplication table, the yardstick, and the ablative
absolute. I'm not so particular about the wine-gallon, for
prohibition will probably do away with that anyhow. When I was in
school I could tell to a foot the equatorial and the polar diameter
of the earth, and what makes the difference. Why, I knew all about
that flattening at the poles, and how it came about. Then Mr. Peary
went up there and tramped all over the north pole, and never said a
word about the flatten