GEOLOGY AND HISTORY. 495 



one of dilettant leisure, and it is clear that American scholarship can 

 no longer he called unproductive. Comparisons inevitably suggest 

 themselves. Harvard possesses a larger numher of professors engaged 

 in independent research than any other institution in the country, and 

 to Harvard, I believe, belongs the honor of leading all American uni- 

 versities in original work. 



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GEOLOGY AKD HISTORY. 



Bt Professor GEANT ALLEN. 



THE science of human life has been the last to recognize that minute 

 interaction of all the sciences which every other department of 

 knowledge now readily admits. We allow at once that no man can be 

 a good physiologist unless he possesses a previous acquaintance with 

 anatomy and chemistry. The chemist, in turn, must know something 

 of physics, while the physicist can not move a step until he calls in the 

 mathematician to his aid. Astronomy long appeared to be an isolated 

 study, requiring nothing more than geometrical and arithmetical skill 5 

 but spectrum analysis has lately shown us its intimate interdependence 

 upon chemistry and experimental physics. Thus the whole circle of the 

 sciences has become a continuous chain of cycles and epicycles, rather 

 than a simple sequence of unconnected and independent principles. 



History, however, still stands to a great extent outside the ever- 

 widening sphere of physical philosophy. It is comparatively seldom 

 that we see an historian like Dr. Curtius acknowledging the inter- 

 action of land and people upon one another's character and destiny. 

 More often we find even the modern annalist writing in the spirit of 

 Mr. Freeman, as though men and women formed the only factors in 

 the historical problem, and the great physical powers of Nature counted 

 for nothing in the game of human life. Yet a few simple instances 

 will show at once the fallacy of such a view. If the ancestors of the 

 Hellenic people had gone to the central plains of Russia instead of to 

 the island-studded waters of the ^Egean, could they ever have pro- 

 duced the magnificent Hellenic nationality with which we are famil- 

 iar ? Was not their navigation the direct result of their geographical 

 position on the shores of an inland sea, intersected by jutting penin- 

 sulas, and bridged over by a constant succession of islands, each within 

 full sight of its nearest neighbors? Was not their polity predeter- 

 mined in large measure by the shape of their little mountain valleys, 

 each open to the seaward in front and closed by a natural barrier of 

 hills in the rear ? Could their plastic genius have risen to the height 

 of the Olympian Zeus and the Athene of Phidias if they had pos- 

 sessed no material for sculpture more tractable than the hard granite 



