Women, on the contrary, are rather disposed to proceed from ideas to facts; to explain phenomena from ideas which already exist in the mind, without having recourse to the slow process of induction. This is the deductive method, and is the very reverse of that employed by the average man of science. It would, however, be a mistake to maintain that the inductive method is always employed, for such is not the case. More than a half a century ago the historian, Buckle, in a notable lecture delivered in the Royal Institution of Great Britain, directed attention to the fact that some of the greatest scientific discoveries had been made by the deductive method. One of these was Newton's epoch-making discovery of universal gravitation. While sitting in a garden he saw an apple fall, and this simple fact caused him to advance from idea to idea, and to be carried, by what Tyndall loved to call "the scientific use of the imagination," into the distant realms of space. And, heedless of the operations of nature, neither observing nor experimenting, the great philosopher, by pure _a priori_ reasoning, "completed the most sublime and majestic speculation that it ever entered into the heart of man to conceive." "It was," as Buckle well observes, "the triumph of an idea. It was the audacity of genius." It was also the triumph of the deductive method in the solution of a problem that one not a genius could have worked out only by the long and toilsome process of induction. Similarly, the great law of metamorphosis in plants, "according to which the stamens, pistils, corollas, bracts, petals and so forth, of every plant, are simply modified leaves," was discovered not by an inductive investigator, but by a poet. "Guided by his brilliant imagination, his passion for beauty and his exquisite conception of form which supplied him with ideas," Germany's greatest poet, Goethe, by reasoning deductively, was able to generalize a law which lesser minds could never have arrived at except through the application of the inductive method. So also was it in the science of crystallography. Its foundations were laid, not by a mineralogist nor a mathematician, as one would suppose, but by one of strong imagination and marked poetic temperament. Like Goethe, Hauey was led by his ideas of beauty and symmetry to work deductively on the problem before him. Descending from ideas to facts, he finally succeeded, after a long series of subsequent labors, in reading "the riddle which had baffled his able but unimaginative predecessors."