5 o 4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



facts or unassorted laws ; they waited the advent of their unknown 

 Newtons to fall into systematic and organic order. 



In the pride of our hearts, we forget for the most part how very 

 young science still is. We who have seen that infant Hercules 

 strangling serpents almost from its very cradle ; we, who have beheld 

 it grow rapidly under our own eyes to virile maturity and adult ro- 

 bustness of thew and muscle we forget how new a power it is in 

 the world, and how feeble and timid was its tender babyhood in the 

 first few decades of the present century. Among the concrete sci- 

 ences, astronomy, the eldest-born, had advanced furthest when our 

 age was still young. It had reached the stage of wide general laws 

 and evolutionary aspirations. But geology had only just begun to 

 emerge from the earliest plane of puerile hypothesis into the period 

 of collection and colligation of facts. Biology, hardly yet known by 

 any better or truer name than natural history, consisted mainly of a 

 jumble of half-classified details. Psychology still wandered discon- 

 solate in the misty domain of the abstract metaphysician. The sci- 

 ences of man, of language, of societies, of religion, had not even be- 

 gun to exist. The antiquity of our race, the natural genesis of arts 

 and knowledge, the origin of articulate speech, or of religious ideas, 

 were scarcely so much as debatable questions. Among sciences of the 

 abstract-concrete class, physics, unilluminated by the clear light of the 

 principles of correlation and conservation of energy, embraced a wide 

 and ill-digested mass of separate and wholly unconnected departments. 

 Light had little enough to do with heat, and nothing at all to do in 

 any way with electricity, or sound, or motion, or magnetism. Chem- 

 istry still remained very much in the condition of Mrs. Jellaby's cup- 

 board. Everywhere science was tentative and invertebrate, feeling its 

 way on earth with hesitating steps, trying its wings in air with tremu- 

 lous fear, in preparation for the broader excursions and wider flights 

 of the last three adventurous decades. 



The great campaign of the unity and uniformity of Nature was the 

 first to be fought, and in that campaign the earliest decisive battle was 

 waged over the bloody field of geology. In 1837 to accept a purely 

 arbitrary date for the beginning of our epoch Lyell had already pub- 

 lished his 6ober and sensible " Principles," and the old doctrine of re- 

 current catastrophes and periodical cataclysms was tottering to its fall 

 in both hemispheres. Wholesale destructions of faunas and floras, 

 wholesale creations of new life-systems, were felt to be out of keeping 

 with a humane age. Drastic cosmogonies were going out of fashion. 

 But even the uniformitarianism for which Lyell bravely fought and 

 conquered, was, in itself, but a scrappy and piecemeal conception side 

 by side with the wider and far more general views which fifty years 

 have slowly brought to us. One has only, to open the " Text-Book of 

 Geology," by Lyell's far abler modern disciple, Archibald Geikie, in 

 order to see the vast advance made in our ideas as to the world's his- 



