While he was thus meditating chaos, Langley came by, and showed
it to him. At Langley's behest, the Exhibition dropped its
superfluous rags and stripped itself to the skin, for Langley
knew what to study, and why, and how; while Adams might as well
have stood outside in the night, staring at the Milky Way. Yet
Langley said nothing new, and taught nothing that one might not
have learned from Lord Bacon, three hundred years before; but
though one should have known the "Advancement of Science" as well
as one knew the "Comedy of Errors," the literary knowledge
counted for nothing until some teacher should show how to apply
it. Bacon took a vast deal of trouble in teaching King James I
and his subjects, American or other, towards the year 1620, that
true science was the development or economy of forces; yet an
elderly American in 1900 knew neither the formula nor the forces;
or even so much as to say to himself that his historical business
in the Exposition concerned only the economies or developments of
force since 1893, when he began the study at Chicago.
Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of
ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts. Adams had
looked at most of the accumulations of art in the storehouses
called Art Museums; yet he did not know how to look at the art
exhibits of 1900.
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