The datum after it has made itself must be decomposable ad infinitum by our conception, but of the steps by which that structure actually got composed we know nothing.

And with the fine, careless justness of the scientist, he had been accumulating for the last thirty years the most private data, collecting and classifying everything, raising this genealogical tree of the Rougon-Macquarts, of which the voluminous papers, crammed full of proofs, were only the commentary.

Novelty, as empirically found, doesn't arrive by jumps and jolts, it leaks in insensibly, for adjacents in experience are always interfused, the smallest real datum being both a coming and a going, and even numerical distinctness being realized effectively only after a concrete interval has passed.

[80] If he means that the only legitimate data of geologists are facts of observation, classified and recorded, well and good; but to deny that they deal largely in hypotheses, and use them constantly as the premisses for inferences which are equally hypothetical, is palpably absurd.

Further, derivative data are space (relations of coexistence), time (relations of irreversible sequence), matter (coexistent positions that offer resistance), motion (which involves space, time, and matter), and force, the ultimate of ultimates, on which all others depend, and from our primordial experiences of which all the other modes of consciousness are derivable.

The only data in our possession is the official census of Chatham county, Georgia, for 1838, containing the number of lunatics among the whites and the slaves.(See the Savannah Georgian, July 24, 1838.)

My data are the distance at which they were seen from Kewewena portage, under the influence of great refraction, and the distance on the following day without unusual refraction, and I am convinced they cannot be less than 2000 feet high; if, however, this staggers you, say 1800, and I am confident you are within the real elevation.

He enters into the philosophy of noses with diverting enthusiasm, and finally concludes, "Non cuique datum est habere nasum:"it is not every one's good fortune to have a nose!