“Yes,” said Doctor X to me, “somehow the two it’s coming together look a bit awkward, but I have had a lot of trouble with that sentence and I came to the conclusion that I’d rather have it clumsy than obscure.” I pointed out have the “tree-trunk which” was surely not what he meant, but that the faults of the sentence lay deeper than that. He was using words not as winged angels always ready to do his command, but as lifeless counters, weights, measures, or automatic engines wrongly adjusted. A _grub_ cannot _manufacture_ a _channel_. Even a human being who can manufacture a boot or a box can only _scoop_ or _dig_ a channel. And you can only have a _channel_ on the outer surface of a tree; inside a tree you have _tunnels_. A tunnel you _drive_ or _bore_. A grub cannot be _within_ either a channel or a tunnel (surely) in the same way as a fly is found _within_ a piece of amber. Doctor X excused himself by saying that “scientists are usually functionally incapable of visualization,” and that “normal mental visualization is dangerous, and abnormal visualization fatal to scientific theorizations, as offering tempting vistas of imaginative synthetical concepts unconfirmed by actual investigation of phenomena”--or words to that effect. Unaware of the beam in his own eye, our Doctor complains more than once in his book of the motes in the public eye, of the extended popular application of scientific terms to phenomena for which they were never intended, until they become like so many blunted chisels. On the other hand, he would be the first to acknowledge that over-nice definition is, for scientific purposes, just as dangerous as blurring of sense; Herr Einstein was saying only the other day that men become so much the slaves of words that the propositions of Euclid, for instance, which are abstract processes of reason only holding good in reference to one another, have been taken to apply absolutely in concrete cases, where they do not. Over-definition, I am trying to show, discourages any progressive understanding of the idea for which it acts as hieroglyph. It even seems that the more precisely circumscribed a word, the less accurate it is in its relation to other closely-defined words. There is a story of a governess who asked her charges what was the shape of the earth? “It may conveniently be described as an oblate spheroid” was the glib and almost mutinous answer. “Who told you girls that?” asked the suspicious Miss Smithson. A scientific elder brother was quoted as authority, but Miss Smithson with commendable common sense gave her ruling, “Indeed that may be so, and it may be not, but it certainly is _nicer_ for little girls to say that the earth is more or less the shape of an orange.”