Soundings in Science
SIR WILLIAM DAMPIER has added to his well-known book a short section on the science of the decade 5930-40. This would, in itself, make this new edition worth acquiring.
It is said that no one lives long enough or knows enough to write a history of science. When to science is added its relation to philosophy and religion the major part of the entire organon of learning becomes the historian's field. Sir William is, however, in an exceptional position for such a general assault upon the flaming ramparts of the world for he has lived longer and knows far more than most of us. And if, from his philosophy and religion, is occa- sionally wafted some of the delicious aromas of fifty years ago, when churchmen were Churchmen and universities were the Universities, that is but to say that we can read—as we should read—something of the man in his work.
Sir William has no difficulty in rising above the mass of detail into the rarer and purer atmosphere of generalisation where he sheds the earthly dross of his Church, his College and his Ancestry. But even at that altitude he does not seem to us always to distinguish completely between the functions of the historian and the annalist, between, that is, the construction and maintenance of a continuous narrative on the one hand, and on the other the record of events which for science are the enunciations of doctrines, or as they are sometimes called, scientific theories. On this account, perhaps, Sir William's valuable philosophic excursuses seem sometimes to fit rather loosely in their context. In fact, he is not a " layman's writer " and his method makes his material somewhat inaccessible to those without a scientific training.
Despite all this the book is incomparably the best of its kind. To one reader, at least, this seems to make it more than a pity that the author has not seen his way to give more time and attention to its form. In particular, when one considers its philosophic back- ground, it is a peculiar fault that it presents no very adequate or logical division of its material. This should surely correspond not to the conventional partitions of the sciences—which are mere economic and academic accidents—but to the major problems of existence as they have successively presented themselves to scientific minds. But the work still holds undisputed the field that it rightly won for itself thirteen years ago. Sir William's vast knowledge and the vigour of his writing justify the hope that among the signs of a new and better world may be a new and even better revision of a valuable book to which every one with any interest in the subject
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