IGNORANCE v. SCIENCE.* WITH so attractive a title the book

before us is certain to be widely read; and the incautious reader, dazzled by the array

• Some 17Arecognisest Laws of Nature. By Ignatius Singer and Lewis H. Berens. With Illustrations. London : John Murry. [12s.1 of scientific terms and by the general philosophic appearance of the book, will be apt to imagine that the contents represent the results of the fruitful labours of men who, though not pro- fessing to be ranked among men of science, have yet by their industry and zeal made themselves masters of a subject in connection with which they claim in their preface to have "struck a mine containing a rich vein of scientific truth." Now this is a claim which always has a right to be respect- fully heard. Science is nothing if not progressive. Every day brings to light some new fact or some new theory with regard to facts. Often the acquirement of this new know. ledge involves a modification of our mode of regarding the old. There is no finality. And we turn with eagerness to any one who can increase, be it never so little, the sum of knowledge of the world. But he who would essay this task must be adequately equipped, or the result may be as disas- trous as in the case before us. We have read this book patiently through from cover to cover, and are forced to declare that we find it a farrago of crude theories, erroneous statements, and badly conducted experiments ; and that every page displays crass ignorance on the part of the authors of what is known with regard to the subjects of which they treat. We charge the authors with ignorance, because then we can more easily believe in their sincerity, though it is very difficult to take them seriously. "It has been an honest endeavour," they say, " and the book now before the public is what our utmost efforts could make it. Would that its quality were in proportion to the labour bestowed upon it I " Would that it were ! we echo. Seldom have we seen labour worse applied.

We have not room in this place for a detailed criticism; but we have made sweeping statements, and proceed to substantiate them with the aid of quotations from the volume itself. What is it, then, that the authors attempt ?—

" What we propose to do, therefore, is to reconsider some of the principal facts of the physical sciences ; to state them with the greatest possible precision without any reference whatever to accepted explanations ; to classify them according to their marks of similarity and dissimilarity; to make generalisations . . . . . . until we have reached an induction which shall embrace all the phenomena of the physical sciences."

We shall see what ability the authors possess "to state facts with the greatest possible precision ":—

" The electroscope informs us of electric or magnetic changes."

"We might connect the vibrating [tuning-] fork with a, very sensitive electroscope, in which case we should have electricity."

"When excited magnets are placed within helices of wires and an electroscope is inserted in the circuit the needle of the electroscope is deflected."

"If we push a volume of air into a vessel whence it cannot escape we literally coerce it into a smaller volume Air thus compressed in a vessel becomes heated. Of course if retained there this heat will be diffused If an electroscope be connected with such a vessel this compression may be shown to be capable of manifesting itself as 'electricity' But it may be said that after the vessel of compressed air has cooled down to normal temperature the air still remains in a state of coercion without giving any evidence of generating 'heat.' Our own belief is that all bodies while in states of coercion are con- stant sources of heating, but that the diffusion is equal to the

rate of generation In case of steel springs or india- rubber there is an increase of temperature both when they are compressed and stretched beyond their normal state. Gases when in the act of attenuation beyond the state that is normal to them we have no doubt in our own mind would also be found to become momentarily heated just at the moment of expansion."

"A body is rubbed and is found capable of exciting a gold leaf electroscope or of deflecting a magnetic needle."

"From the same source of 'electricity' greater intensity is obtained from thin than from thick wires."

"Connect the two bodies to be experimented on with a delicate galvanoscope and rub them against each other. The effect will, of course, be the same as when dissimilar bodies are exposed to

the influence of heating Take two similar bodies and proceed in like manner, when there will be no deflection. But if the two rubbed pieces are separately brought near a gold-leaf electroscope both will cause a diversion of the leaves; showing that both bodies have been excited, but being equally excited, cannot react with each other."

"The total [electrical] resistance of six pounds of copper would be the same whether the six pounds of copper were only a yard in length with a corresponding diameter, or a mile long and corre- spondingly thinner."

"In the electric transformer,' for instance, we have a mass of won which is electrified; and from it the ' electricity ' is again conducted away. Instead of iron, we could make a transformer of dry air provided we could find suitable means to insulate it from the rest of the atmosphere."

And so on, through every chapter of the book. To the un- professional reader these paragraphs may appear to be as

good science as might be desired ; the expert recognises their grotesque untruth. But a man may be only partially in.

formed and yet have something new to tell us. Let us see what qualifications Messrs. Singer and Berens possess for discovering new facts. We will take as illustration an experiment described on p. 159. According to them, if a body is prevented from moving when it otherwise would do so, it is in a "coerced state," and a production of heat or rise of temperature always accompanies a state of coercion. And this is how the principle is experimentally " verified " :—

" We take two bar magnets and place them parallel to each other with a delicate thermometer between their further poles so that the bulb of the thermometer is touched on either side by one of the magnets, and then revolve our inducing magnet [i.e, another bar magnet which can be brought up and revolved near the former]. If this is done with even a moderate speed, just turning the magnet in the hand without any mechanical appliance, the mercury of the thermometer will rise. Of course the increase of temperature will depend on the velocity given to the inducing field-magnet, and also on the temperature of the air and other con- ditions under which the experiment is made; and that because these conditions influence the rate of diffusion. If the experiment just described be carried out with ordinary care and skill using a delicate thermometer* there will be no difficulty in producing an increase of temperature of several degrees. And with a great velocity and under conditions which would prevent loss by radia- tion, this heating might be increased to such an extent as to heat

the magnet to redness Such overheating is often observed in dynamos, when the resistance of the conducting wires is great and the rate of generation high."

Is this guile or innocence ? Though it professes to be an actually performed experiment, we do not hesitate to say that it is trash from beginning to end. No such heating effect due to the moving magnet was ever observed. We do not deny that

their thermometer reading rose; many accidental causes might make it do so (warm hand, warm breath, Ste.), but its rise was certainly not due to the moving magnet, nor yet was it because one magnet remained fixed.

Thus, with an exceedingly meagre and inaccurate know- ledge of their subject, and totally unable themselves to take simple precautions against the intrusion of experimental error, Messrs. Singer and Berens essay a criticism of the work of the master-minds of the last two centuries. They commence ostensibly with a discussion of the theory of gravitation ; but throughout the book they make it clear that the term covers far more than its current connotation. In fact, so eager are they to discover unity in Nature, they find themselves unable to distinguish any difference in kind between gravitation, heat, electricity, or magnetism :—

" The distinction between 'electric' and 'magnetic' attraction

is arbitrary We might go further than this and show the identity of heat, electricity, and magnetism—not their inter- convertibility, but their identity By merely rubbing two bodies we get—not in succession, nor by the conversion of forces into each other, but simultaneously — heat," light,' electricity." magnetism ' (or, if we like, we might call the attraction alsogravitation since two bodies flying against each other laterally may as truly be said to gravitate against each other as when this attraction takes place in a vertical direction)."

And yet they profess to recognise the "confusion arising out of confusion of language." Is it to be wondered at that they quarrel with the quantitative laws proved by Newton for gravitation alone? And when we examine their notions of mechanics we find confusion worse confounded. A serious student of mechanics finds many different kinds of quantities, to which special names are definitely affixed in order that any one may be referred to without ambiguity. But our authors will have none of it:—

" Here, as everywhere else, unless otherwise stated, we use the terms force and energy synonymously, and in the sense of power or strength, and shall use either of these indiscriminately as the one or the other may happen to be most convenient."

"In each ease it [i.e., a cannon ball] will be able to penetrate until it has overcome an amount of resistance equal to its own energy,—i.e., the impulse which has been imparted to it."

"If a body presses against another body, then in a philosophic sense the pressure exerted is the measure of the 'work' per- formed by that body."

"Pressure is work' and so is motion."

"In the foregoing we are continually using the term energy in the sense of available source of power."

• We hare employed one graduated In tenths of degrees, and one degree of which corresponded to 16 ram, of mercurial thread. [Antliora footnote.]

" But mass in the sense in which Newton used it is synonymous with weight or pressure Thus if two bodies were found by experiment to perform under like conditions the same amount of work, their 'mass,' force," power,' or 'energy' were con- sidered as being equal."

" Persistence, or 'inertia,' too, is well known, and is indeed identical with resistance, only looked at from a different stand- point."

"In this sense, then, 'matter' would stand for the unknown something which offers resistance, and 'force' for the degree (or quantity) of this resistance. The matter composing our earth,' for instance, would mean the resistance of the planet and the force exercised by the earth' on another body would merely mean the rffiasure of this resistance."

So that when we are further told that " matter ' is merely a hypothetical assumption" we grow dizzy. We feel as though translated into that region where- " Thinking is but an idle waste of thought,

And nought is everything and everything is nought."

Is it possible from this jumble of ideas to extract any

meaning ? These would-be philosophers seem incapable of differentiating anything from anything else. Is it to be marvelled at that when they proceed to examine ( !) the fundamental experiments on which the modern doctrine of energy is built up they stultify themselves even more miser-

ably ? Apparently incapable of forming any accurate concep- tion as to what the term " energy " means, they proceed to characterise the doctrine of the conservation of energy as absurd, to glibly charge Joule with having admitted a "grave

source of error" in his classical experiments, which establish the equivalence of the heat produced and the energy dis- appearing in a mechanical operation, and to stigmatise as based on false conceptions Lord Kelvin's doctrine of the dissipation of energy, which asserts that whenever energy passes from one form into another (as, e.g., in a working engine) there is a tendency for it to become less available for the performance of mechanical work.

These discussions occupy whole chapters ; yet are founded, forsooth, not on an examination of the original works them.

selves, but on meagre accounts of them contained in certain text-books of popular science ! The brilliant achievements of Kelvin, and Joule, and Helmholtz, and other master-workers will not be affected by such efforts as these. We do not intend to follow them through their wild criticisms or through the still wilder speculations which fill the concluding

chapters (e.g., that the earth is the hub of a large wheel of half a million miles diameter rolling on an imaginary circle round the sun). The four cardinal principles which they

claim to have discovered have, perhaps, some little truth in them; repeatedly, indeed, we detect distorted versions of well- recognised principles of science ; but, stated as they are here

in loose language, and resting on false reasoning and crude and imaginary experiments, and mingled with much that is entirely erroneous, they have no value whatever. We trust we have said enough to warn the unwary that an elegantly printed volume of nearly five hundred pages, bearing super- ficially the impress of a weighty treatise, may nevertheless contain nothing but pretentious pnerilities. And this is but a first instalment ! The authors declare that they have a much larger work in manuscript, and threaten its publication. Which may heaven or the publisher avert !