Chapter II

. is intended so to bring the mind of the reader into contact

with certain philosophical problems presented to us by our experiences with the external world and our efforts to learn the facts about it, that he may approach the subject of relativity with an appreciation of the place it occupies as a phase of human thought and a pillar of the scientific structure. Until the reader is aware of the existence of these problems and the directions taken by the efforts, successful and unsuccessful, to unravel them, he is not equipped to comprehend the doctrine of relativity at all; he is in much the same case as a child whose education had reached only the primer stage, if asked to read the masterpieces of literature. He lacks not alone the vocabulary, but equally the mental background on which the vocabulary is based.

It will be noted that in this and the chapters immediately following it, the Editor has supplied material freely. The obvious interpretation is that satisfactory material covering the desired ground was not found in any of the essays; for we are sure the scope and number of the credited excerpts will make it clear that all contributions were adequately scrutinized in search of available passages. This "inadequacy" of the competing essays has been severely commented upon by several correspondents, and the inference drawn that as a whole the offerings were not up to the mark. Such a viewpoint is wholly unjust to the contestants. The essays which paid serious attention to the business of paving the way to relativity necessarily did so at the expense of completeness in the later paragraphs where specific explanation of the Einstein theories was in order. Mr. Law, whose essay was by all means the best of those that gave much space to introductory remarks, found himself left with only 600 words in which to tell what it was that he had been introducing. The majority of the contestants appear to have faced the same question as to subject matter which the Judges faced, and to have reached the same decision. They accordingly devoted their attention toward the prize, rather than toward the production of an essay that would best supplement that of the winner. It is for this very reason that, in these preliminary chapters, so large a proportion of the material has had to be supplied by the Editor; and this very circumstance is a tribute to the good judgment of the competitors, rather than ground for criticism of their work.

The general introduction of