session of our present happy abundance of microbes in every sort, but
our knowledge of the universe in almost every respect. Science no longer
waited for the apple to fall before inferring a law of gravitation, but
went about with a stick knocking fruit off every bough in the hope that
something suggestive would come of it. On make-believes of all kinds it
based the edifices of all kinds of eternal veracities. It behooved
poetry, or fiction, which was radically the same, to return to its
earliest and simplest devices if it would find itself in the embrace of
science, and practise the make-beliefs of its infancy. Out of so many
there were chances of some coming true if they were carried far enough
and long enough. In fact, the hypothetical method of science had
apparently been used in the art of advertising the works in which the
appetite of the new reading public was flattered. The publishers had
hypothesized from the fact of a population of seventy millions, the
existence of an immense body of raw, coarse minds, untouched by taste or
intelligence, and boldly addressed the new fiction to it. As in many
suppositions of science their guess proved true.

Then why, the hardy listener who had spoken before inquired, was not
make-believe the right method for the author, if it was the right method
for the scientist and the publisher? Why should not the novelist
hypothesize cases hitherto unknown to experience, and then go on by
persistent study to find them true? It seemed to this inquirer that the
mistake of fiction, when it refused longer to be called an art and
wished to be known as a science, was in taking up the obsolescent
scientific methods, and in accumulating facts, or human documents, and
deducing a case from them, instead of boldly supposing a case, as the
new science did, and then looking about for occurrences to verify it.

The philosopher said, Exactly; this was the very thing he was contending
for. The documents should be collected in support of the hypothesis; the
hypothesis should not be based on documents already collected. First the
inference, then the fact; was not that the new scientific way? It looked
like it; and it seemed as if the favorite literature of the new reading
public were quite in the spirit of the new science. Its bold events, its
prodigious characters, its incredible motives, were not they quite of
the nature of the fearless conjecture which imagined long and short
electric waves and then sp