We owe that miracle to science; and it is a miracle.But the scientists who have worked it have been neither gods nor witch doctors.They have been men: men who had faith in the future; and they have used no magic.What they have used is at bottom only Darwin's method, because that method is science.Science is experiment; science is trying things.It is trying each possible alternative in turn, intelligently and systematically;and throwing away what won't work,and accepting what will,no matter how it goes against our prejudices.And what works adds one more piece to the slow, laborious, but triumphant understanding of our world.This is not a secret or a mysterious progress.If it sometimes seems so, that is just because the day-to-day work of science is so unspectacular.You hear nothing from the research worker for years, and then, suddenly, there is the result in the headlines:penicillin or the jet engine or nuclear fission.No one tells the layman about the years of experiment and failure.How is he to know what has not been done, or to guess the labor of what has?What is he to think but to marvel at the skill of science, and to fear its power?
