JOSEPH PRIESTLEY. 107 



But, great as these changes may be, they sink into insignificance 

 beside the progress of physical science, whether we consider the im- 

 provement of methods of investigation, or the increase in bulk of solid 

 knowledge. Consider that the labors of Laplace, of Young, of Davy, 

 and of Faraday ; of Cuviei", of Lamarck, and of Robert Brown ; of 

 Von Baer, and of Schwann ; of Smith and of Hutton, have all been 

 carried on since Priestley discovered oxygen ; and consider that they 

 are now things of the past, concealed by the industry of those who 

 have built upon them, as the first founders of a coral-reef are hidden 

 beneath the life's work of their successors ; consider that the methods 

 of physical science are slowly spreading into all investigations, and 

 that proofs, as valid as those required by her canons of investigation, 

 are being demanded of all doctrines which ask for men's assent and 

 you will have a faint image of the astounding difference in this respect 

 between the nineteenth century and the eighteenth. 



If we ask what is the deeper meaning of all these vast changes, I 

 think there can be but one reply. They mean that Reason has as- 

 serted and exercised her primacy over all provinces of human activity : 

 that ecclesiastical authority has been relegated to its proper place ; 

 that the good of the governed has been finally recognized as the end 

 of government, and the complete responsibility of governors to the 

 people as its means ; and that the dependence of natural phenomena 

 in general, on the laws of action of what we call matter, has become 

 an axiom. 



But it was to bring these things about, and to enforce the recog- 

 nition of these truths, that Joseph Priestley labored. If the nine- 

 teenth century is other and better than the eighteenth, it is to him 

 and to such men as he that we owe the change. If the twentieth 

 century is to be better than the nineteenth, it will be because there 

 are among us men who walk in Priestley's footsteps. 



Such men are not those whom their own Generation delights to 

 honor ; such men, in fact, rarely ti'ouble themselves about honor, but 

 ask, in another spirit than Falstaff 's, " What is honor ? Who hath 

 it ? He that died o' Wednesday." But whether Priestley's lot be 

 theirs, and a future generation, in justice and in gratitude, set up 

 their statues ; or whether their names and fame are blotted out from 

 remembrance, their work will live as long as time endures. To all 

 eternity, the sum of truth and right will have been increased by their 

 means ; to all eternity, falsehood and injustice will be the weaker be- 

 cause they have lived. From advance sheets of Macmillarts Mag- 

 azine. 



