theory of gases to be ignored for a whole generation.  But this does not seem to depend especially on difficulties of language or of international communication.  There is a queer element of arbitrary fashion in the scientific world which every now and then decrees that certain people shall be ignored, no matter how sound their work, or that certain hypotheses shall be treated as matters of faith, no matter how flimsy their structure.  Man does not all at once become a creature of pure reasoning by assuming the robe of science and entering the laboratory.  But national prejudices are not pre-eminent among the forces which dictate these fashions.  Indeed in the English intellectual world there operates, if anything, a certain anti-national prejudice.  It has sometimes been easier for an Englishman to get a hearing in Germany than in England, and it is certain that in many subjects a respect is paid to German writers which they would not have been able to win if they had written either in French or in English.  This is due to a certain encyclopaedic minuteness which is the peculiar property of German industry.  If you want an exhaustive negative, I remember an archaeologist saying once, you must go to the Germans.  That is to say, on almost any subject you will find some German, and a German only, who has taken the trouble to go through the whole matter from beginning to end, not attending merely to what is interesting or important, but writing down all that is to be found out in all the authorities bearing on that subject.  And this work will be insufferably tedious and, taken by itself, may be very unilluminating.  But it is much less tedious for the reader than it was for the writer, and, if suitably indexed, such a work will in permanence serve as a guide-book to those who are going to exercise real thought and insight upon that subject.  It is the element of disinterested drudgery which the Germans have contributed to science.  Not that they have lacked men of genius, but that they have added to genius that which, Carlyle notwithstanding, it so often lacks—­the infinite capacity for taking pains.  Take up any scientific treatise in any language and on almost any subject, cast your eye down the references to authorities in the footnotes on a few pages at random, and you will find probably three out of four of those cited bearing German names.  They will outbalance English, American, French, Dutch, and Italian added together.  If you pass from quantity to quality, if you take the leading ideas contributed to the subject, you will find the balance redressed.  Here French and English and others hold their own, and perhaps a little more than their own.  But in bulk of work, and especially in the faithful, unrepaying service of the hard dry fact, the Germans have set a standard to the world.  It may be that their very merit is due in part to a lack of certain qualities as well as to a superabundance of others.  There is a want of proportion in some