tention
will show that science, as the word is commonly used, implies these
things: first, the gathering of knowledge through observation; second,
the classification of such knowledge, and through this classification,
the elaboration of general ideas or principles. In the familiar
definition of Herbert Spencer, science is organized knowledge.

Now it is patent enough, at first glance, that the veriest savage must
have been an observer of the phenomena of nature. But it may not be so
obvious that he must also have been a classifier of his observations--an
organizer of knowledge. Yet the more we consider the case, the more
clear it will become that the two methods are too closely linked
together to be dissevered. To observe outside phenomena is not more
inherent in the nature of the mind than to draw inferences from these
phenomena. A deer passing through the forest scents the ground and
detects a certain odor. A sequence of ideas is generated in the mind of
the deer. Nothing in the deer's experience can produce that odor but
a wolf; therefore the scientific inference is drawn that wolves have
passed that way. But it is a part of the deer's scientific knowledge,
based on previous experience, individual and racial; that wolves are
dangerous beasts, and so, combining direct observation in the present
with the application of a general principle based on past experience,
the deer reaches the very logical conclusion that it may wisely turn
about and run in another direction. All this implies, essentially, a
comprehension and use of scientific principles; and, strange as it seems
to speak of a deer as possessing scientific knowledge, yet there is
really no absurdity in the statement. The deer does possess scientific
knowledge; knowledge differing in degree only, not in kind, from the
knowledge of a Newton. Nor is the animal, within the range of its
intelligence, less logical, less scientific in the application of that
knowledge, than is the man. The animal that could not make accurate
scientific observations of its surroundings, and deduce accurate
scientific conclusions from them, would soon pay the penalty of its lack
of logic.

What is true of man's precursors in the animal scale is, of course, true
in a wider and fuller sense of man himself at the very lowest stage
of his development. Ages before the time which the limitations of our
knowledge force us to speak of as the dawn of history, man had reached
a high stage of de