Yet, kindly as are the surrounding faces, and pleasant as is the consciousness that one’s clothes and accent excite no comment, there is, on the part of many scientific men, a persistent uneasy feeling that one has gained this position on false pretences. It is these remarkable modern books to which we have referred which render the feeling acute. At the same time, it is very difficult to state precisely the elements of this feeling. We understand, however, that there are young poets and novelists who experience very much the same emotion when one of the great “official” men of letters talks about literature. It appears that such people often get everything subtly wrong, that their criticism never pierces to the real heart of the matter, that they make literature at once more pompous and more tame than it really is. These new cultured expositors of science affect one very much like that. Their indisputable intelligence and their wide knowledge do not save them; they lack something--it may be a mere familiar way of talking--which marks the practitioner; we feel they touch their subject with padded fingers. We attribute no occult influence to laboratories, but we think the expositor of science who is not also a creator is something like that curiously unconvincing creature--the theoretical sailor who has never been to sea. For that reason we are uneasy in the presence of these numerous modern expositions. Such work of the kind as was done in the old days was done by real men of science in their spare time. They had the competence, if also something of the crudity, of the workman in the factory who explains to you how his machine works. The modern writers are so much more like those frock-coated “attendants” at Exhibitions. One is oppressed with the same suavity, the same incredible readiness, the same secret doubt whether he has ever handled a tool in his life.... Such being our estimate of our modern teachers, we may be permitted to be sceptical concerning the complete satisfactoriness of their account of the present disposition and relations of science. When they vouch for the complete respectability and harmlessness of science we wonder if they are not a little too kind. We have an absurd nervousness, as in the presence of a reformed burglar. He looks well-dressed enough and his hands are not impossibly horny; moreover, we are told that the two very respectable gentlemen with him find him a most charming companion. We are prejudiced, we suppose; but to our thinking there is a coarseness about the jaw, an occasional hard glint in the eye, which would make us reluctant to accept him as, at any rate, a sleeping companion. We wonder if those two gentlemen, the one reverend and the other nearly so, ever feel a little apprehensive during the night? POPULAR SCIENCE