Stranger than fiction

Abstract

When I was an undergraduate in Brown, it seemed quite out of order either to write or to read a work on science. It also seemed difficult for scientists to produce such a work. At college, interest in was next to interest in athletics; it was the moving educational spirit at Brown, many more students electing the courses than the courses in letters and philosophy. There was no lack of technical books and monographs. Science was popular; but not and scientific books. And if Alexander Winchell in his Walks and Talks in the Geological Field touched the rocks after the dramatic manner of Moses, his scientific brethern murmured. It wasn't scientific to make an igneous rock spout poetry. Long before I started for college, I licked up the and the poetry of Winchell's Walks and Talks and looked around for more. I found The Story of the Earth and Man by Sir J. W. Dawson, the rather solid meat of Archibald Geikie and Hugh Miller, and our state geological reports. Then from over the edge of the world appeared the Popular Science Monthly, The Warfare of Science by Andrew D. White, and the Lay Sermons of Huxley-so my scientific reading stood out to sea. Such was popular science a generation ago. Behind this reading, as preparation for it, was my Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne, the first book I personally owned; and still earlier in my teens, a borrowed life of John James Audubon. But such books were scarce, and especially scarce in my neighborhood. Out of the Youth's Companion, from the vivid pen of Arabella Buckley and others, I got some of the sounded and best writing of my times. But the scientists as a whole were not concerned with the public, though the public as a whole was very much concerned with the scientists. The attitude of the public was accurately reflected in the