484 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



declared that " some men would learn more in Hampstead stage 

 than others in the tour of Europe " ; or, to take an illustration : 

 In a cathedral at Pisa swung a chandelier. Thousands had passed 

 in and out in an unthinking, heedless manner before Galileo's day, 

 but when the young Florentine philosopher looked toward that 

 ceiling, that chandelier, as a type of the pendulum, took on a new 

 oscillation, and its vibrations extended farther and farther, until 

 they reached the very center of the earth, and again swung out- 

 ward toward other worlds, to return, bringing tidings of the gravi- 

 tation that holds sway on those celestial orbs. In like manner a 

 humble stone-mason at Cromarty, Scotland, saw on the rock some 

 peculiar forms. He examined them carefully, and deciphered 

 from these hieroglyphics the record of the " Old Red Sandstone," 

 and from that time onward the name of Hugh Miller has been 

 known in almost ever hamlet of civilized earth. The life of that 

 illustrious Frenchman, Baron Cuvier, furnishes another and ex- 

 cellent illustration of the same thing. In the plaster-quarries of 

 Montmartre, just without the environs of Paris, were lying scat- 

 tered here and there a lot of animal remains. Thousands and 

 doubtless millions of people had passed that way, and seen in 

 them only so many old bones. Not so when Cuvier looked. The 

 time had come for the arcana to be opened, and like the dry bones 

 in the prophet's vision they became alive again and began to 

 speak ; and, wherever geology is studied, there the voice is heard 

 chanting peeans of praise to the immortal Frenchman. His was 

 not the record of a man who waded through seas of slaughter to 



write his name 



" Among the few, the immortal ones, 



That were not born to die." 



Yet he has written it on an equally enduring tablet ; he has writ- 

 sen it on the history of geological progress, where it will endure 

 per secula seculorum. 



Science has also turned her attention to legal pursuits, and 

 made her voice heard in courts of justice. Nearly every one 

 doubtless is familiar with cases of men who have been arrested, 

 charged with murder, and the blood found upon their garments 

 examined. It is also probably known that there is some difference 

 of opinion as to the degree of certainty with which human blood 

 can be distinguished from that of an animal. This difference 

 seems to be, in part at least, the result of the different methods 

 pursued by the various investigators. Many persons suppose that 

 the corpuscles are the only things to be examined. These are 

 globular in shape and of about the same form for nearly all the 

 mammalia. They, however, show a difference in size, and from 

 this difference may be told approximately the animal from which 

 they have been derived. There is another and equally valuable 



