element of disinterested drudgery which the Germans have contributed to science. Not that they have lacked men of genius, but that they have added to genius that which, Carlyle notwithstanding, it so often lacks--the infinite capacity for taking pains. Take up any scientific treatise in any language and on almost any subject, cast your eye down the references to authorities in the footnotes on a few pages at random, and you will find probably three out of four of those cited bearing German names. They will outbalance English, American, French, Dutch, and Italian added together. If you pass from quantity to quality, if you take the leading ideas contributed to the subject, you will find the balance redressed. Here French and English and others hold their own, and perhaps a little more than their own. But in bulk of work, and especially in the faithful, unrepaying service of the hard dry fact, the Germans have set a standard to the world. It may be that their very merit is due in part to a lack of certain qualities as well as to a superabundance of others. There is a want of proportion in some of these vast Teutonic treatises that takes the heart out of the English student. Some witty person has said that German science consists in demonstrating over again with enormously elaborate apparatus what an Englishman has already made plain enough to any sensible person with the aid of a gingerbeer bottle and an old sardine tin. But I suspect there is another side to the question. The German has probably worked out his figures to the twentieth decimal where the Englishman was content with the second, and it may always turn out that the twentieth decimal has its value. Be that as it may, the co-operation of both types of mind is necessary, and patient endeavour in the elaboration of detail is the peculiar function which the German academic tradition has developed in the service of the general cause of the advancement of learning.