346 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



generations of human culture to which we are heirs. Seems it not, 

 then, a wicked, almost a sacrilegious, thing to hasten with eager glad- 

 ness to repudiate the past to which we owe everything, and to exult 

 over the ruins of its beliefs ? It is as if a son should rejoice over his 

 father's feebleness, uncover his nakedness, and make scorn of his in- 

 firmities. As he who has been the best son is in turn the best father, 

 so the generation which guards with respect the good which there is 

 in the past, and puts gently aside that which is effete, will make the 

 most stable progress in its day, and transmit the best inheritance to 

 the generation which follows it. No doubt in the future, as in the 

 past, the knowledge of one period will sometimes appear foolishness 

 at a more advanced period of human evolution the truth of one age 

 become the laughing-stock of the next ; but we may profitably reflect 

 that decaying doctrine had its use in its day, and it may teach us mod- 

 esty to consider that much which has its place in our mental organi- 

 zation now, and is serving its proper end in the development thereof, 

 will one day probably be put aside as obsolete belief. Let it be 

 our prayer that when that day comes, and this generation comes up 

 for critical judgment as an historical study before the tribunal of pos- 

 terity, it may be justly said of it that it has done as much for the 

 progress of mankind as some of the generations upon which the wisest 

 of us look back, perhaps, with indulgent compassion, and the unwise 

 anions: us with foolish scorn. 



There is nothing in the attitude of modern society toward science, 

 cold and suspicious as it may sometimes be, which necessitates or 

 warrants an arrogant, defiant, and aggressive spirit of hostility on its 

 side. No great courage is required nowadays to declare a new truth, 

 however hostile it may be to received belief, nor is any serious suffer- 

 ing entailed by the declaration ; there is no need, therefore, for a sci- 

 entific man to put on the airs of a martyr. He is a very little mar- 

 tyr who is persecuted only by the pens of unfriendly critics, and 

 rather a pitiful object when he sits down by the wayside, and calls 

 upon all them that pass by to behold and see how hardly he is used. 

 It was very different when Science first made its voice heard ; when, 

 under the cruel persecutions of the Inquisition, Galileo unsaid with 

 his tongue truths which his heart could not unsay, and that grand 

 figure in the noble army of scientific martyrs, Giordano Bruno, went 

 calmly and resolutely to the stake rather than utter one word of re- 

 tractation. The saddest contemplation in the world, perhaps, is that 

 of the brave who, like him, have died fighting in the battle for the 

 cause that seemed to perish with them ; whose lives of suffering and 

 sore travail have set, often through cruel tortures, in black clouds of 

 gloom which no ray of hope could penetrate. Theirs was not the 

 laurel crown of victory after the agony of the struggle ; no popular 

 applause, no encouraging shout, greeted their ears as they sank down 

 exhausted in death ; the shouts which they heard were shouts of exe- 



