Discoverers Not Inventors
Although Galileo only discovered the moons of Jupiter, we often and unconsciously think of him as if he had been their creator, and had first set them to play their untiring game of hide-and-seek round the stately planet; and so also in no irreverent spirit we call the laws which Kepler divined to regulate certain movements of the heavenly bodies, “Kepler’s Laws,” although he disclaimed the title, grandly affirming that God, whose laws they were, had waited some thousand years before one man, even Kepler, had discerned them. And so again, notwithstanding our conviction that the star Neptune has been shining in the sky since what we shall be content to call “the beginning,” and that all the tiny planets which have so rapidly been added to our astronomical catalogues are probably as old as the sun, we cannot help feeling as if Adams, Leverrier, Hind, and their brethren, had just planted those lights in the sky, and that midnight should be sensibly less dark because of their addition to the heavens.
When we work as transformationalists we are like sculptors, not evolving a pre-existent statue from a concealing mass, but bestowing a statue on a block of marble. The hollow screw is Archimedes’ screw; the condensing steam-engine, Watt’s engine; the railway locomotive, Stephenson’s locomotive; the electric telegraph, Oersted’s telegraph; the Crystal Palace, Fox and Paxton’s palace. Yet as implied in what has been already said, we treat discoverers as if they were inventors, and to make amends we call inventors discoverers. And although, in strictness of speech, it is inadmissible to speak of Watt, as accomplished men are frequently found doing, as the discoverer of the steam-engine, and only Sancho Panza thought of invoking blessings on the man who first invented sleep, still the popular confusion between the discoverer and the inventor shows how difficult it is to assign the one higher praise than the other.—Prof. George Wilson.