I have a friend who is quite versed in science, and he tells me that any book on science that is more than ten years old is obsolete.  Now, that puzzles me no little.  If that is true, why don’t they wait till matters scientific are settled, and then write their books?  Why write a book at all when you know that day after tomorrow some one will come along and refute all the theories and mangle the facts?  These science chaps must spend a great deal of their time changing their intellectual clothing.  It would be great fun to come back a hundred years from now and read the books on science, psychology, and pedagogy.  I suppose the books we have now will seem like joke books to our great-grandchildren, if people are compelled to change their mental garments every day from now on.  I wonder how long it will take us human coral insects, to get our building up to the top of the water.

Whoever it was that said that consistency is a jewel would need to take treatment for his eyes in these days.  If I must change my mental garb each day I don’t see how I can be consistent.  If I said yesterday that some theory of science is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and then find a revision of the statement necessary to-day, I certainly am inconsistent.  This jewel of consistency certainly loses its lustre, if not its identity, in such a process of shifting.  I do hope these chameleon artists will leave us the multiplication table, the yardstick, and the ablative absolute.  I’m not so particular about the wine-gallon, for prohibition will probably do away with that anyhow.  When I was in school I could tell to a foot the equatorial and the polar diameter of the earth, and what makes the difference.  Why, I knew all about that flattening at the poles, and how it came about.  Then Mr. Peary went up there and tramped all over the north pole, and never said a word about the flattening when he came back.  I was very much disappointed in Mr. Peary.

I know, quite as well as I know my own name, that the length of the year is three hundred and sixty-five days, five hours, forty-eight minutes, and forty-eight seconds, and if I find any one trying to lop off even one second of my hard-learned year, I shall look upon him as a meddler.  That is one of my settled facts, and I don’t care to have it disturbed.  If any one comes along trying to change the length of my year, I shall begin to tremble for the safety of the Ten Commandments.  If I believe that a grasshopper is a quadruped, what satisfaction could I possibly take in discovering that he has six legs?  It would merely disturb one of my settled facts, and I am more interested in my facts than I am in the grasshopper.  The trouble is, though, that my neighbor John keeps referring to the grasshopper’s six legs; so I suppose I shall, in the end, get me a grasshopper suit of clothes so as to be in the fashion.