WAYFARERS. ACROSS the moorlands and the open wind-swept spaces Past field and farm, hedgerow and fruitful orchard places, And the great roads, Wherefrom the wanderer's eye, Made free of beauty, roams in ecstasy O'er sea and sky to clear delight composed. Smile the near woodlands, all their starry heart revealing, Hill-gleams of shimmering blue, mysterious depths concealing; The windy ridge, Ripens the treasure that by toil men take From earth's ungiving, unwithholding lap. Stir of the woods, airs of the moorlands still untaken By man's indomitable toil, Breathe the breath of the wild in the ordered fields, and waken In hearts that understand Life to be lived; And on the ancient land Joy as of endless morning lays her hand, And youth undying springs from this dear soil. Ways ever open, ever free for such communion, With what despair your pilgrim sees Where man has wrought and Nature joined in loveliest union, Upraised a stubborn wall; Knows parked and pent Beyond his utmost call Things best beloved; only where trees are tall May guess the flower-starred depths, the freshening breeze. Comrades and lovers! O beloved on my life's wayfaring! Your hearts are what the woodlands show: Your love the airs that from the mountains breathe, repairing The labour and the stress, The road's fatigue ; Draw near again to bless, Though jealous walls, the woodland past, oppress, I hear you, though the appointed barrier stands unbroken Clear call, I hear you-watchword cried afar for token Meeting at last, The heart its burden tell. O comrades, forward! On the open fell LEONARD HUXLEY. SCIENTIFIC PROPHECIES. THE most valuable things which we have or know were not prophesied, because they were with us in some shape or other before men began to record their prophecies. The knowledge that the earth is round, and of the apparent yearly tour of sun and planets through starland; a belief in development,' and that all things are ultimately composed of one sort of matter, called by Aristotle πporn λn, by the old Greek atomists' atoms,' and recently identified first with hydrogen, then with ether, then with helium, then with liquid space,' then with ions and electrons; acquaintance with the chief forces of Nature, fire, lever, lens, arch, gunpowder, and steam-engine, and with the chief institutions of society, religion, marriage, language, writing, kings, lords, and commons, property, barter, division of labour, and money-all these things were prehistoric. In enriching these ideas and applying them to more objects (thanks chiefly to our artificial ears, eyes, and sense of touch), in sifting them and making them more definite (thanks chiefly to 'clock balance and footrule'), and, above all, in organising them and interweaving them into the fabric of our national life so that they cannot again turn mouldy and be forgotten, we have made the new world of science quite unlike the old world of science. But we have done this with the aid of what was always with us. Our moorings have been shifted into better and securer quarters, but the anchors have been the same. This process is not the fulfilment of prophecy; it is something greater, it is progress— gradual, unswerving, ever widening, without beginning or end. Progress is along the main road of human history; prophecy lurks in little lanes lying off the main road and leading nowhither. Prophecies are isolated anticipations of future events or discoveries, and they are scientific if based on law. But though the subject of this paper is based on law, it is not law, or rather it is law plus something else, and more especially the something else. Every scientific law deals with past, present, and future; but it deals with the past as much as with the future, and it is the proper business of science to be impartial between past and future. On the other hand, whenever a scientific man concentrates his attention on the past in a way which excludes the future, telling us what in very deed happened a million years ago; and whenever he looks away from the past into the future, telling us not what may but what will happen a million years hence, he is just a little unscientific, and encroaches on the private preserves of novelists and writers of romance. There is always an element of fiction in this sort of history and prophecy. Some grain of guesswork leavens the scientific lump; and the size and kind of grain differ in different sciences. Mathematical laws apply, as we all know, to all time and all space, and are as true as true can be if only its units are equal, its points invisible, and its lines impalpable. That great big ‘if always looms before our minds, and haunts us till we ask, 'In the name of goodness, what actual or possible things are you referring to ?' To which the mathematician replies, 'I do not know, but only guess that we shall some day find something which these puzzles explain.' Mathematicians are patient, humble people; they wait long, and their guess is seldom spoken, but exists for the most part as a silent hope or a prayer, which, when it comes true, is like a prophecy which is fulfilled. Thus, 2,100 years ago, Apollonius taught nearly all that can be known about ellipses; and for 1,800 years this learning seemed to some a madman's delusion, to others like a game of chess, and to others beautiful but useless as a tune in music, until Galileo and Kepler discovered that this was the very tune to which the planets have been dancing round their sun and the moons round their planet from all eternity. No one ever questioned the usefulness of the laws of natural science, but almost everyone forgets that these laws will only be available to-morrow in the same way as they are available to-day if no other force interferes, and that they resemble a decree nisi in the Divorce Court, which some King's Proctor may at any time intervene and upset. The Nautical Almanac-that typical manual of scientific prophecy-writes this 'if' in invisible ink, and confidently assumes that gravity is the only power which need be taken into account; yet some rival power, such as heat, affinity, or magnetism, may at any moment oust gravity from its solitary throne among the stars, and that is why not all the scientific men in all the world can say when the Leonids will reappear, or whether the sun will rise to-morrow. This confident assumption, this unquestioning belief that what has been will be because it has been, is not science, but blind, unthinking, undiluted Toryism. It is a guess with very big odds in its favour; and he who shouts out at the top of his voice that these big odds are a dead cert., and then wins, is hailed as a prophet. In the social sciences we are apt to ignore sometimes the usefulness, sometimes the very existence, of law. It does not follow that, because the Comtists always bowl wides, all historians are cock-eyed. Many of them see true and far; and far sight is akin to foresight, truth to sooth. Thus Thucydides, when he diagnosed revolution—just as a medical man diagnoses measles-revealed the future as well as the past. Two forces, he says, disappear-patriotism and contract. Two become dominant, unenlightened self-interest and partisanship at a white heat. There also appear political clubs, a social war, and petty tyrants. Then, he adds, 'These things have been and always will be if human nature remains the same, though there will be differences of degree and local colouring.' These very seven oddly assorted symptoms of social disease did reappear 2,200 years later in the great French Revolution. The prophecy is none the less a prophecy because the prophet was diffident and underlined his 'if.' Again, political economists have shown that bad money must drive out good money when both circulate side by side; and although Aristophanes noted that this was the case 2,300 years ago, Gresham 340, Locke 210, and Walker 20 years ago, political economists, like historians, build their edifices on the shifting sands of the human nature that they know; and although we are nearly, we are not quite, sure that this law will hold even in Europe on the next occasion on which good and bad money compete. Some new madness may seize the people. True, these shifting sands have not shifted for 2,300 years; but that only leads us to guess that they will not shift, and a guess based on the experience of 2,300 years seems but a broken reed when compared with the guesses of men who point to millions of years to support them. No wonder men deride you nowadays if you declare that political economy is a fairly safe guide in telling what will be the effect of a certain future economic change. But lest I should press too hardly on this poor discredited science, one thing shall be mentioned to its credit. In 1817 Ricardo added to this abstract science one of its most abstract laws, called the law of comparative cost. The law was quite new, and was not |