It is probable, however, that for a few years still physics will not travel beyond it.

The present hypothesis suffices for grouping known facts, and it will doubtless enable many more to be foreseen, while new successes will further increase its possessions.
Then the day will arrive when, like all those which have shone before it, this seductive hypothesis will lead to more errors than discoveries.

It will, however, have been improved, and it will have become a very vast and very complete edifice which some will not willingly abandon; for those who have made to themselves a comfortable dwelling-place on the ruins of ancient monuments are often too loth to leave it.
In that day the searchers who were in the van of the march after truth will be caught up and even passed by others who will have followed a longer, but perhaps surer road.

We also have seen at work those prudent physicists who dreaded too daring creeds, and who sought only to collect all the documentary evidence possible, or only took for their guide a few principles which were to them a simple generalisation of facts established by experiments; and we have been able to prove that they also were effecting good and highly useful work.
Neither the former nor the latter, however, carry out their work in an isolated way, and it should be noted that most of the remarkable results of these last years are due to physicists who have known how to combine their efforts and to direct their activity towards a common object, while perhaps it may not be useless to observe also that progress has been in proportion to the material resources of our laboratories.
It is probable that in the future, as in the past, the greatest discoveries, those which will suddenly reveal totally unknown regions, and open up entirely new horizons, will be made by a few scholars of genius who will carry on their patient labour in solitary meditation, and who, in order to verify their boldest conceptions, will no doubt content themselves with the most simple and least costly experimental apparatus.

Yet for their discoveries to yield their full harvest, for the domain to be systematically worked and desirable results obtained, there will be more and more required the association of willing minds, the solidarity of intelligent scholars, and it will be also necessary for these last to have at their disposal the most delicate as well as the most powerful instruments.