THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE FROM 1836 TO 1886. 503 

 THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE FROM 1836 TO 1886. 



By GRANT ALLEN. 



FIFTY years ago, science was still inchoate. Much had already 

 been done by the early pioneers. The ground had been cleared ; 

 the building-materials had been in part provided ; the foundations had 

 been duly and ably laid ; but the superstructure as yet had hardly 

 been raised a poor foot or two above the original level. The work 

 of the last half-century has been twofold. On one side it has been 

 accumulative merely : new stocks of organizable material the raw 

 bricks of science have been laid up, as before, ready to the call of 

 the master-mason, but in far greater profusion than by any previous 

 age. On the other side it has been directive and architectonic ; the 

 endless stores of fact and inference, thus dug out and shaped to the 

 hand by the brick-makers of knowledge in a thousand fields, have 

 been assiduously built up by a compact body of higher and broader 

 intelligences into a single grand harmonious whole. This last task 

 forms, indeed, the great scientific triumph of our epoch. Ours has 

 been an age of firm grasp and of wide vision. It has seen the down- 

 fall of the anthropocentric fallacy. Cosmos has taken the place of 

 chaos. Isolated facts have been fitted and dovetailed into their 

 proper niche in the vast mosaic. The particular has slowly merged 

 into the general, the general into still higher and deeper cosmical 

 concepts. We live in an epoch of unification, simplification, correla- 

 tion, and universality. When after-ages look back upon our own, 

 they will recognize that in science its key-note has been the idea of 

 unity. 



Fifty years ago, there were many separate and distinct sciences 

 but hardly any general conception of science at large as a single, 

 rounded, and connected whole. Specialists rather insisted pertina- 

 ciously on the utter insularity of their own peculiar and chosen do- 

 main. Zoologists protested, with tears in their eyes, that they had 

 nothing to do with chemistry or with physics ; geologists protested 

 with a shrug of their shoulders, that they had nothing to do with 

 astronomy or with cosmical genesis. It was a point of honor with 

 each particular department, indeed, not to encroach on the territory 

 of departments that lay nearest to it. Trespassers from the beaten 

 path of the restricted science were prosecuted with the utmost rigor 

 of the law. And within the realm of each separate study, in like 

 manner, minor truths stood severely apart from one another ; elec- 

 tricity refused to be at one with magnetism, and magnetism was 

 hardly on speaking terms with the voltaic current. OrganiEation and 

 subordination of part to whole had scarcely yet begun to be even 

 aimed at. The sciences were each a huge congeries of heterogeneous 



