Abstract
POLITICS saturates the February magazines, but science is not altogether drowned in this plethora of diplomatic diatribes. There are four articles in the Contemporary of interest to scientific readers. Mr. Herbert Spencer traces the development of the sculptor, and shows how, in its primitive character, sculpture was an auxiliary to ancestor-worship. “The tomb and the temple are,” he shows, “developed out of the shelter for the grave—rude and transitory at first, but eventually becoming refined and permanent; while the statue, which is the nucleus of the temple, is an elaborated and finished form of the original effigy placed on the grave. The implication is that, as with the temple so with the statue, the priest, when not himself the executant, as he is among savages, remains always the director of the executant—the man whose injunctions the sculptor carries out.” Mr. W. H. Hudson writes pleasantly, if somewhat aimlessly, about the village of Selborne and of the simple naturalist whose observations have made it famous. Mr. W. H. Mallock continues his study of “Physics and Sociology.” The argument of the two articles which preceded the present one may be thus summarised: Great men are analogous to atoms of superior size, on whose presence the aggregation of all the other atoms depend, therefore they should form the first study of the sociologist. Two propositions (among others) which follow from this conclusion are now stated by Mr. Mallock; the first of them being more or less of a heresy, so far as scientific opinion is concerned. The propositions are as follows, (1) Other things being equal, communities progress and become civilised not in proportion to the talents of the mass of the individuals who compose them, but in proportion to the percentage which occurs in each of the individuals whose talents are superior to those of the mass. (2) Other things being equal, communities progress and become civilised in proportion to the desirability of the rewards which are practically attainable in each by the exercise of superior talents, and which thus stimulate the possessors of these talents to develop them, and make them actual instead of merely potential. Mr. D. C. Boulger having suffered from diphtheria, and been made a victim of the antitoxin treatment, survived, and now records his experience of the disagreeable character of the disease and its sequelæ, all of which unpleasantness was aggravated, in his opinion, by the employment of antitoxic serum. From his particular case, he passes to a general discussion of diphtheria and antitoxin, which he condemns. So few are the gifts to science and education in England, that we rejoice to find Mr. Bernard Shaw commending in the Contemporary such benefactions to the attention of millionaires. The questions which a millionaire, moved by a generous spirit to benefit any locality, should ask himself are: “Has it a school, with scholarships for the endowment of research, and the attraction of rising talent at the universities? Has it a library, or a museum? If not, then he has an opening at once for his ten thousand or hundred thousand pounds.”
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Science in the Magazines. Nature 53, 331–332 (1896). https://doi.org/10.1038/053331a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/053331a0