"From which," said the lecturer, "we see that a pike
is very slow in forming his ideas, and then again in unforming them, thus resembling many respectable members of a higher community, who spend one-half of their lives in assimilating the obsolete ideas of their fathers, and through the rest of their lives stick to those ideas as the only possible truths. They can never learn when the hand of science has removed a glass. partition." That is stupid, no doubt, but hardly commoner than the stupidity of which men of science are themselves frequently guilty,—the rejection of belief in the reality of a partition, the positive restraints of which they might feel if they would, just because they can see through it. Transparent walls in nature really exist— for example, the ,wall between species and species—which science constantly proposes to ignore, only because to the eye of science they are transparent.
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