William Francis Gray Swann Quote

When an outstanding genius causes science to take a leap forward beyond the vision of his contemporaries, there usually follows a period of depression in which it seems that all that is worth doing has been done, and that the universe has not already revealed must forever defy the power of man to fathom.

Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, 1928, Three Centuries of Natural Philosophy (p. 237)