THE LITERATURE ON QUESTIONS

The interrogative literature is scant. Such literature as there is certainly includes the Pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata, but ignorance prevents me surveying, still less discussing, the history of the interrogative literature.

is, what increment of the product of pressure and volume of a given gas is due to what increment of its temperature? So many times Boyle asked people to study this question, so many times he expressed his disappoint­ment in the neglect which this question suffered; and nothing happened for over a century. Why?

Boyle also raised questions which were studied. This must have en­couraged him, or else he would not have written what amounts to the first scientific questionnaire, The Natural History of a Country. It was published first as a paper, and then as a short book which saw several editions. Its questions were for travellers, concerning flora, fauna, cli­mates, and customs. We cannot understand Captain Cook, or Captain Bligh, without knowing the tremendous influence of this volume. It was first noted by J. F. Fulton, the distinguished Boyle bibliophile. Its in­fluence spread far and wide. Let me mention one example. Albert Chamis- so, who marks the end of the Age of Reason, and who has a foot in ro­manticism, a refugee from the French Revolution, wrote a fantastic auto­biography, Peter Schlemiehl, about the miseries of a fellow who foolishly sold his shadow to the devil. When Peter loses hope of ever again finding happiness he becomes a traveller.

We do not know the content of this lore, and can only partly reconstruct

it. It is possible, for example, that the Notes and Queries of the Royal Anthropological Institute are linked with Boyle’s Natural History of a Country, but I, for one, do not know the connections or the significance. We know, for another instance, that Newton’s Queries in his Opticks dominated much of eighteenth century science and were imitated, say, by Joseph Priestley in his great book on different airs. The total effect is not yet known or studied - except very superficially. We know that in the eighteenth century a prize was offered for the discovery of any connec­tion between electricity and magnetism. We also know that the first such discovery was made half a century later by Hans Christian Oersted. Did he collect the prize? Was the prize cancelled by then? Why? I do not know. There are many books which mention the prize. None tells us whether Oersted collected the prize or if not, why not. The absence of any progress whatever could have led the academic institution involved to believe that the problem was insoluble. We know from contemporary evidence that the first response to Oersted from Paris was of utter in­credulity: the news was taken as a hoax.

I hope this indicates how little is known about the history of questions and how significant it seems nonetheless. We can see this even in our own lifetime. There is consensus on, say, what are the current leading problems in physics, and every physicist can recite the semi-official list. Where a disagreement about ranking questions rages abroad, there may be debate about given answers to certain questions, but it is hardly ever about the ranking of the significance of these questions.

IV.