756 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



works of those who are doing their best to interpret Nature on this 

 basis, that the views of the objectors are more tenable, though 

 there are too many who for some reason imagine that, if an author 

 can be found to be in error in some point, his fundamental prin- 

 ciples are not trustworthy. That would be as if Kepler should 

 condemn the Copernican system when he found that the planets 

 move in elliptical orbits instead of circular ones, as was assumed 

 by Copernicus, and should say that Copernicus " would talk pre- 

 tentiously about matters that he knew nothing about." 



The astronomer pays no more attention to old theories of his 

 science than he does to astrology. He even says of Kant's pres- 

 entation of the nebular theory that he gives no reason for it that 

 an astronomer is bound to respect. No chemist to-day needs 

 to know or care what anybody thought about chemistry before 

 Dalton. No physicist to-day needs to know or care what any one 

 thought of electricity before Faraday. Even Franklin's opinion 

 carries no weight. In heat Runif ord and Davy are the first whose 

 opinions have any value. In biology nobody appeals to Cuvier or 

 Agassiz. Psychology was revolutionized by the p ublication of Mr. 

 Spencer's works in 1855 ; and the other day Ferrier was honored 

 in England for his work in the localization of mental faculties. 

 The new sciences of ethnology and comparitive philology have 

 also revolutionized all notions as to the history of mankind. 

 Histories of the past, written within the last fifty years, are of no 

 more account than the stories of Herodotus and Diodorus about 

 the Egyptians and Assyrians. 



About twenty-five years ago Lenormant, the French historian, 

 announced as nearly ready for publication a history of India. In 

 1870 he notified the public that he had abandoned the work, hav- 

 ing made the discovery that most of the data he had collected 

 were worthless and that it was impossible to get anything that 

 was trustworthy. Henshaw, of the Anthropological Society of 

 Washington, declares that the languages of the Indians of this 

 country, of which there were fifty-eight linguistic families and 

 three hundred dialects, north of Mexico, at the time of the dis- 

 covery of America, are none of them related in any way to Asi- 

 atic tongues ; also, as to the origin of the Indian, it must have been 

 in ages so far removed from our own time that the interval is 

 to be reckoned, not in years of chronology, but by the epoch of 

 geologic time. 



Again, what shall we think on religious matters when a man 

 like Le Conte states that we are on, the verge of a profound and 

 radical change in the basis of Christian beliefs ; when Rev. Dr. 

 Martineau, whose life has been spent in the defense of historic 

 Christianity, concludes as the result of his best endeavors to dis- 

 cover the truth, and whose hopes and wishes and expectations 



