24 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



through paleontology and geology to the fiery-liquid youth of our 

 planet, and hence extends its hand in the nebular hypothesis to the 

 theory of the persistence of energy, while anthropology, ethnology, 

 and the history of the primitive ages lay the bridge to linguistics, the 

 theory of knowledge, and the historical sciences. The examination of 

 the vital processes, physiology, has stripped off the larva-casing of 

 vitalism, and has burst from its cocoon as applied physics and chemis- 

 try. While the physiologists of Germany during the first half of the 

 century, and those of England and France in part till to-day, were 

 engaged only with morphology, and at most with experiments on 

 animals, for a generation past all the intellectual and instrumental 

 aids of the physicist, all the arts of the chemist, have been naturalized 

 in the physiological laboratory, and have been thereby much aug- 

 mented. Nothing better illustrates the lively interworking of the 

 different branches of science, at the present time, than that the inves- 

 tigation into original generation has helped surgery to the greatest 

 progress it has made since Ambroise Pare, and pathology to a con- 

 ception of the nature of the most destructive infectious disease, pul- 

 monary tuberculosis. 



Sciences, also, whose circles once hardly intersected, have ap- 

 proached each other. The triumph of the inductive method rendered 

 historians and philologists like Thomas Buckle and Max Mtiller anxious 

 to make themselves masters of its advantages, for it was evident that 

 the difference between their activity and that of the naturalist was not 

 fundamentally very great : of course not, for induction is, in practice, 

 only sound reason sagaciously applied. To the interworking of archae- 

 ological and scientific labors we owe a well-founded acquisition of re- 

 cent times, the study of the primitive condition of mankind, created 

 jointly by the Danish scholars Forchhammer, Steenstrup, Thomsen, 

 and Worsaae, which is in many cases more interesting than real his- 

 tory. 



It would be superfluous to extend the painting of this pictui-e. We 

 have given enough to show that the view that regards the science of 

 the present as having been seduced into by-ways, and as being dissi- 

 pated among special investigations definitely separated from each 

 other, and that the notion that it is lacking in general ideas, that the 

 wood can not be seen for the trees, are deceptive. It is, however, 

 probable that no more such comprehensive theories as those of the 

 persistence of energy and of descent will appear during the next dec- 

 ade, because a third theory of such moment is now hardly conceivable. 

 We may therefore well repeat what Dove said, at about the middle of 

 the last century, that " the impulse which science received in Newton's 

 time, through the co-operation of his great talents, was not responded 

 to by a proportionately rapid progress in the following period. Time 

 was needed to elaborate the thoughts which had been so grandly 

 aroused in the different fields, to adjust them in detail to the phenom- 



