The book _A Budget of Paradoxes_ by Augustus de Morgan is one of
the earlier surveys of pseudoscience. A couple of brief quotations from
the early part of the work seem apt to this newsgroup:

"During the last two centuries and a half, physical knowledge has been
gradually made to rest upon a basis which it had not before. It has
become _mathematical_. The question now is, not whether this or that
hypothesis is better or worse to the pure thought, but whether it accords
with observed phenomena in those consequences which can be shown
necessarily to follow from it, if it be true."

'1. _Attempt by help of the old philosophy, the discoverer not being in
possession of modern knowledge._ A poor schoolmaster, in rags,
introduced himself to a scientific friend with whom I was talking, and
announced that he had found out the composition of the sun. "How was
that done?" - "By consideration of the four elements." - "What are they?" -
"Of course, fire, air, earth, and water." - "Did you not know that air, earth,
and water, have long been known to be no elements at all, but compounds?" -
"What do you mean, sir? Who ever heard of such a thing?"'

John Savard