Science in Short Chapters

by W. Mattieu Williams

If a personal vindication were the business of this letter I could easily show that these statements respecting the avocations, the scientific training, and actual attainments of Dr. Huggins are gross and atrocious misrepresentations; but Dr. Huggins has no need of my championship; his high scientific position, the breadth and depth of his general attainments, and the fact that he is not Huggins the brewer, are sufficiently known to all in the scientific world, with the exception of the “Quarterly” reviewer.

My object is not to discuss the personal question whether book-making and dredging afford better or worse training for experimental inquiry than the marvelously exact and exquisitely delicate manipulations of the modern observatory and laboratory, but to protest against this attempt to stop the progress of investigation, to damage the true interests of science and the cause of truth, by throwing low libellous mud upon any and everybody who steps at all aside from the beaten paths of ordinary investigation.

The true business of science is the discovery of truth; to seek it wherever it may be found, to pursue it through bye-ways as well as highways, and, having found it, to proclaim it plainly and fearlessly, without regard to authority, fashion, or prejudice. If, however, such influential magazines as the “Quarterly Review” are to be converted into the vehicles of artful and elaborate efforts to undermine the scientific reputation of any man who thus does his scientific duty, the time for plain speaking and vigorous protest has arrived.

My readers will be glad to learn that this is the general feeling of the leading scientific men of the metropolis; whatever they may think of the particular investigations of Mr. Crookes, they are unanimous in expressing their denunciations of this article.

The attack upon Mr. Crookes is still more malignant than that upon Dr. Huggins. Speaking of Mr. Crookes’s fellowship of the Royal Society, the reviewer says: “We speak advisedly when we say that this distinction was conferred on him with considerable hesitation;” and further that “We are assured, on the highest authority, that he is regarded among chemists as a specialist of specialists, being totally destitute of any knowledge of chemical philosophy, and utterly untrustworthy as to any inquiry which requires more than technical knowledge for its successful conduct.”

The italics in these quotations are my own, placed there to mark certain statements to which no milder term than that of falsehood is applicable. The history of Mr. Crookes’s admission to the Royal Society will shortly be published, when the impudence of the above statement respecting it will be unmasked; and the other quotations I have emphasized are sufficiently and abundantly refuted by Mr. Crookes’s published works, and his long and able conduct of the Chemical News, which is the only and the recognized British periodical representative of chemical science.

If space permitted, I could go on quoting a long series of misstatements of matters of fact from this singularly unveracious essay. The writer seems conscious of its general character, for, in the midst of one of his narratives, he breaks out into a foot-note, stating that “This is not an invention of our own, but a fact communicated to us by a highly intelligent witness, who was admitted to one of Mr. Crookes’s séances.” I have taken the liberty to emphasize the proper word in this very explanatory note.

The full measure of the injustice of prominently thrusting forward Dr. Huggins and Mr. Crookes as “recent converts” to Spiritualism will be seen by comparing the reviewer’s own definition of Spiritualism with Mr. Crookes’s remarks above quoted. The reviewer says that “The fundamental tenet of the Spiritualist is the old doctrine of communication between the spirits of the departed and souls of the living.”

This is the definition of the reviewer, and his logical conclusion is that Mr. Crookes is a Spiritualist because he explicitly denies the fundamental tenet of Spiritualism, and Dr. Huggins is a Spiritualist because he says nothing whatever about it.

If examining the phenomena upon which the Spiritualist builds his “fundamental tenet,” and explaining them in some other manner, constitutes conversion to Spiritualism, then the reviewer is a far more thoroughgoing convert than Mr. Crookes, who only attempts to explain the mild phenomena of his own experiments, while the reviewer goes in for everything, including even the apotheosis of Mrs. Guppy and her translation through the ceiling, a story which is laughed at by Mr. Crookes and everybody else, excepting a few of the utterly crazed disciples of the “Lamb’s Conduit Mediums” and the “Quarterly” reviewer, who actually attempts to explain it by his infallible and ever applicable physiological nostrum of “unconscious cerebration.”