JOHN DALTON 503 



Wissenscliaft, particularly in that development of it known to us as 

 positive science, the case stands far otherwise. Yet, even here, the uni- 

 fication of knowledge, each nation contributing its quota to the common 

 fund, happens to be perhaps the achievement of the nineteenth cen- 

 tury. Organization by countries, especially in the case of France, there 

 was between the Renascence and the French Revolution; but a world- 

 wide pact, embracing all effort, no matter where, did not eventuate then. 

 Now, it is of prime moment for the present subject that the instru- 

 ments of this recent unification have been the German university sys- 

 tem, and the academies and institutes of France. By contrast, the 

 English-speaking world possessed no such developed organs, if we ex- 

 cept the Scottish universities where, naturally enough, Dalton met 

 immediate recognition. Thus English science till but yesterday — teste 

 even Darwin — has betrayed individualistic tendencies. These were 

 never more evident than in Dalton's career, and during his life, 

 moreover. 



At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Cuvier, in his 

 " Rapport " of 1808, is extolling — and justly — the preeminence of 

 France in the exact sciences, an extraordinary contrast manifests itself 

 across the Channel. In the same year, John Playfair bewails the " in- 

 controvertible proofs of the inferiority of the English mathematicians," 

 and refers to " the public institutions of England " as its cause. 8 Eight 

 years later, in a damnatory notice of Dealtry's " Principles of Flux- 

 ions," another writer notes it for a paradox that, Newton dead, his 

 country " should, for the last seventy or eighty years, have been in- 

 ferior to so many of its neighbours." Once more, in the same review 

 for 1822, a third critic deplores the state of affairs at Cambridge, where 

 " for want of facilities " men " are apt to lose the spirit of investiga- 

 tion." Brewster's article in the Quarterly Review 10 which, as is well 

 known, led to the foundation of the British Association, is no less sar- 

 castic and outspoken. These attacks were directed against the English 

 universities : X1 that of Babbage, the peg on which Brewster hung his 

 exordium, had the Royal Society for its mark. 12 Now the extraordi- 



8 Cf. Edinburgh Review, No. XXII., January, 1808, pp. 249 f. A review of 

 La Place's " Traite" de Mecanique Celeste." 



8 Ibid., No. LIII., September, 1816, pp. 87 f. (Dealtry was a fellow of 

 Trinity College, Cambridge, and a fellow of the Royal Society.) Dalton himself 

 made the same complaint in his lectures at the London Royal Institution 

 (1810) ; cf. "A New View of the Origin of Dalton's Atomic Theory," Roscoe 

 and Harden, p. 105. 



"Vol. XLIII. (1830), pp. 305 f. 



"Analogous circumstances - produce analogous protests even now— e. g., 

 "Oxford at the Cross Roads," Professor Percy Gardner (1905). 



12 " Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, and on some of its 

 Causes," by Charles Babbage, Lucasian professor of mathematics in the Uni- 

 versity of Cambridge (1830). 



