It took very little learning and no alchemy to foretell that the month of February and the neighborhood of Boston would give ice enough; and I told him that the ice-crop would be abundant; but I was honest enough to explain to him that my outlook into the future was no better than his.
"One of the unfavorable results of the attempt to popularize science is this: the reader of popular scientific books is very likely to think that he understands the science itself, when he merely understands what some writer says about science.
"Take, for example, the method of determining the distance of the moon from the earth--one of the easiest problems in physical astronomy.

The method can be told in a few sentences; yet it took a hundred years to determine it with any degree of accuracy--and a hundred years, not of the average work of mankind in science, but a hundred years during which able minds were bent to the problem.
"Still, with all the school-masters, and all the teaching, and all the books, the ignorance of the unscientific world is enormous; they are ignorant both ways--they underrate the scientific people and they overrate them.

There is, on the one hand, the Irish woman who is disappointed because you cannot tell fortunes, and, on the other hand, the cultivated woman who supposes that you must know _all_ science.
"I have a friend who wonders that I do not take my astronomical clock to pieces.

She supposes that because I am an astronomer, I must be able to be a clock-maker, while I do not handle a tool if I can help it! She did not expect to take her piano to pieces because she was musical! She was as careful not to tinker it as I was not to tinker the clock, which only an expert in clock-making was prepared to handle.
"...

Only a few weeks since I received a letter from a lady who wished to come to make me a visit, and to 'scan the heavens,' as she termed it.
Now, just as she wrote, the clock, which I was careful not to meddle with, had been rapidly gaining time, and I was standing before it, watching it from hour to hour, and slightly changing its rate by dropping small weights upon its pendulum.