Blunders about science like
those illustrated above are soon excused. Few think much the worse of
the perpetrators, whereas a corresponding obliviousness to language,
history, literature, and indeed to learning other than their own which
we of the scientific fraternity have agreed to condone in our members
is incompatible with public life of a high order. Both classes have
their disabilities. That of the scientific side is well expressed in
an incident which befell the late Professor Hales. Examining in the
Little-Go _viva voce_, he asked a candidate, with reference to some
line in a Greek play, what passage in Shakespeare it recalled to him,
and received the answer "Please, sir, I am a mathematical man." Some,
no doubt, would rather ignore gravitation. When, for example, one
hears, as I did not long since, several scientific students own in
perfect sincerity that they could not recall anything about Ananias
and Sapphira and another, more enlightened, say that he was sure
Ananias was a name for a liar though he could not tell why, one is
driven to admit that ignorance of this special but not uncommon kind
does imply more than inability to remember an old legend. We may be
reluctant to confess the fact, but though most scientific men have
some recreation, often even artistic in nature, we have with rare
exceptions withdrawn from the world in which letters, history and the
arts have immediate value, and simple allusions to these topics find
us wanting.
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