NATURAL SCIENCE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 397 



tributed immensely to popular education, mental receptivity, 

 closer contact, industrial cooperation and general intelligence. 



SCIENCE IN THE DAWN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. At the 

 beginning of the nineteenth century, science as such had no exist- 

 ence either as a branch of learning or as a special discipline, 

 still less as a preparation for practical life. Mathematics, highly 

 esteemed largely because of its ancient origin and associations, 

 and natural philosophy, had a limited recognition ; but the term 

 science meant as yet hardly more than knowledge or learn- 

 ing. The eighteenth century had, however, sowed broadcast 

 the seeds of science and the nineteenth soon began to reap 

 the harvest. Before 1850 scientific schools as distinct from 

 others had been founded both within and without the older 

 colleges and universities. New associations and academies for 

 the advancement or promotion of science soon sprang up ; 

 science courses appeared in some of the public schools ; funds 

 for scientific research began to be provided ; and thousands 

 of eager and enthusiastic students began to prefer science, and 

 especially applied science, to the older "classical" learning. 

 Meantime, the marvellous achievements of invention and of in- 

 dustry had caught and fixed public interest and attention, so 

 that by the opening of the twentieth century, no branch of learn- 

 ing stood in higher favor than science, either for its own sake or 

 as a preparation for useful service in contemporary life. 



The master keys of science, now everywhere employed for 

 unlocking the problems of the cosmos, are: first, the principles 

 of mathematics, which admit mankind into the mysteries of the 

 relations of number and space the abstract skeleton of science, 

 and second, the principles of evolution and of energy, which 

 reveal some, at least, of the secrets of form and of function, 

 not only of the earth and of plants and animals, but of the 

 heavens ; something of the prodigious forces of the universe 

 and their orderly behavior ; something of that apparently in- 

 finite and eternal energy which, while forever changing, is never 

 lost ; something, though as yet but little, of the nature and the 

 processes of life. 



