I think it more befitting to my present position however, that I should address myself especially to younger students of natural science, with a view to pointing out some of the mistakes which they perhaps are particularly liable to fall into, mistakes which no doubt further study would enable them to correct for themselves, but which often remain uncorrected very much because the studies are so fitfully pursued that it is only when some circumstance arouses a public interest in scientific subjects that their attention is drawn to them again. It may appear but a commonplace observation when I say that one of the first things to be guarded against is impatience of the drudgery needful to master even the alphabet of almost any branch of science.
I mean more by this than that there is no royal road to learning, and my meaning extends to this, namely, that there is a great temptation to forsake the steady pursuit of knowledge along the more tedious pathways of careful observation and well-considered induction for the more attractive highways of fashionable theory. I am not alluding now to those whose chief object is to get a reputation for the possession of scientific knowledge careless as to the basis upon which that reputation may rest.
It may suffice for such to read a review of them, to plunge hotly into a discussion probably with far more rashness of assertion than they dare to whom the subject had been long familiar. But I speak rather of this danger as besetting those who are sincere in their desire to get to the root of matters. It is a seductive error. It seems so much easier to discuss the merits of a theory than to plod along with the accumulation of facts, forgetting that we are not qualified to judge of the merits of a theory until we have a wide knowledge of the facts upon which it is based.
Presidential Address, by Right Reverend Bishop Samuel Tarratt Nevill, to the Otago Institute, 17 January 1878. Transactions and Proceeding of the New Zealand Institute. Volume 10, pp562-566