On the
contrary, I shall say--what I am sure every scientific man will say--
So much the better. That is the sort of audience which we want, if
we are teaching natural science. We do not want haste, enthusiasm,
gobe-moucherie, as the French call it, which is agape to snap up any
new and vast fancy, just because it is new and vast. We want our
readers to be slow, suspicious, conservative, ready to "gib," as we
say of a horse, and refuse the collar up a steep place, saying--I
must stop and think. I don't like the look of the path ahead of me.
It seems an ugly place to get up. I don't know this road, and I
shall not hurry over it. I must go back a few steps, and make sure.
I must see whether it is the right road; whether there are not other
roads, a dozen of them perhaps, which would do as well and better
than this.
This is the temper which finds out truth, slowly, but once and for
all; and I shall be glad, not sorry, to see it in my readers.
And I am bound to say that it has been by that temper that this
theory has been worked out, and the existence of this past age of
ice, or glacial epoch, has been discovered, through many mistakes,
many corrections, and many changes of opinion about details, for
nearly forty years of hard work, by many men, in many lands.
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