A series of
experiments and arguments proves to every man that he, as an object of observation, is subject to certain laws, and man submits to them and never resists the laws of gravity or impermeability once he has become acquainted with them.
You'll kill yourself with your stuffy old experiments."
Always keenly interested in biology, his almost unlimited means had permitted him to undertake, in secret, a series of daring experiments which had carried him so far in advance of the biologists of his day that he had, while others were still groping blindly for the secret of life, actually reproduced by chemical means the great phenomenon.
That is my
experiment Will you help, Ben Weatherstaff?"
It is also most instructive to compare--but I have not space here to enter on details--the evidence advanced by our best botanists on the question whether certain doubtful forms should be ranked as species or varieties, with the evidence from fertility adduced by different hybridisers, or by the same author, from
experiments made during different years.
"Certainly I do; and your mistake has been in supposing that an
experiment which no few every-day married couples would be only too glad to try, was ever meant for two such love-birds as you.
In every other spot the fire must necessarily be oblique, which would seriously militate against the success of the
experiment.
Had they tried the
experiment of recovering the letter?
But these were mere trifles, and they assured their mother that the
experiment was working finely.
With your permission, therefore, I will merely watch the progress of the
experiment."
It is clear also that the supposed absence of words rests solely upon the introspective testimony of the persons
experimented upon.
But, as Uncle Alec's
experiment was intended to amuse the young folks, rather than suggest educational improvements for the consideration of the elders, she trusts that these shortcomings will be overlooked by the friends of the Eight Cousins, and she will try to make amends in a second volume, which shall attempt to show The Rose in Bloom.
At this point, and before Bell had begun to
experiment with his telegraph, the scene of the story shifts from Canada to Massachusetts.
"I think myself bound to prove, in justice to both of us, that I am not asking you to try this
experiment in deference to any theory of my own devising.
I remarked, moreover, with respect to
experiments, that they become always more necessary the more one is advanced in knowledge; for, at the commencement, it is better to make use only of what is spontaneously presented to our senses, and of which we cannot remain ignorant, provided we bestow on it any reflection, however slight, than to concern ourselves about more uncommon and recondite phenomena: the reason of which is, that the more uncommon often only mislead us so long as the causes of the more ordinary are still unknown; and the circumstances upon which they depend are almost always so special and minute as to be highly difficult to detect.
