Notwithstanding its immense importance and the vast extent and complication of its application in modern times, science is not really difficult for any person of ordinary school education and of good natural intelligence to comprehend, provided it is presented in a clear, plain, common sense manner, in popular language with illustrations drawn from everyday life and experience. The much talked-of methods of science are, after all, nothing more than the methods of common sense, applied with systematic care by minds disciplined to a high degree of efficiency. And, in fact, the only practical difference between the mind of a trained scientist and that of any other intelligent person is that the scientist has acquired a way or habit of looking at and thinking about things and events, which enables him to get at their inmost nature and meaning more swiftly and accurately than he could do if he went to work in a haphazard manner as, in truth, his forerunners of the earlier centuries were obliged to do. The pioneer must always work by rule of thumb, but when he has exploited his field he knows better ways. Each branch of science has its own particular methods, but it is not necessary for the average reader to study these special methods in order to become able to grasp the facts and principles that have been developed by them. The results are all thrown into a common store--or should be if science is to attain its utmost usefulness to humanity--and from the common store the great public, the people at large, should be enabled freely to draw. The object of this series of books is to form such a store of science for the people. It may encourage those who look with some degree of timidity upon the task of trying to understand the great discoveries and achievements of modern science to know that even the ablest scientists, leaders in their own particular branches, do not pretend, or attempt, to grasp the special methods or the technicalities of any division of science except that one in which their own work is done. They stand, with regard to other branches, practically on the same footing with the unscientific reader, having over him only such possible advantages as their special training in clear thinking and in the intense application of the mental powers may give them.