734 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



assume to himself the responsibility of attaching praise or blame to 

 his fellow-men for the judgments which they may venture to express, 

 I say that, unless he would commit a sin more grievous than most of 

 the breaches of the Decalogue, let him avoid a lazy reliance upon the 

 information that is gathered by prejudice and filtered through passion. 

 Let him go to these great sources that are open to him as to every 

 one, and to no man more open than to an Englishman; let him go 

 back to the facts of Nature, and to the thoughts of those wise men 

 who for generations past have been the interpreters of Nature. 



TYNDALL'S KELATION TO POPULAE SCIENCE. 



By Professor HELMHOLTZ.i 



THE awakening desire for scientific instruction, ever finding new 

 expression among the educated classes of all European countries, 

 we must consider not merely as a striving after new forms of amuse- 

 ment, or a mere empty and barren curiosity ; it is rather a well-jus- 

 tified intellectual necessity, and is in close connection with the most 

 important springs of mental development in these times. The natural 

 sciences have become a powerful influence in the formation of the so- 

 cial, industrial, and political life of civilized nations, not only from the 

 fact that the great forces of Nature have been subordinated to the 

 aims of man, and have supplied him with a host of new means to^ 

 attain them ; though this mode of their action is sufficiently important 

 that the statesman, the historian, and the philosopher, as well as the 

 manufacturer and the merchant, cannot pass without participation in. 

 at least, the practical results ; but because there is another form of 

 their action which goes much deeper and further, though it is, per- 

 haps, more slow in manifesting itself; I mean their influence in the 

 direction of the intellectual progress of humanity. It has often been 

 said, and even brought as a charge against the natural sciences, that, 

 through them, a schism (Zwiespalt), formerly unknown, has been intro- 

 duced into modern education. And, indeed, there is truth in this. A 

 schism is perceptible ; yet such must mark every new step of intel- 

 lectual development wherever the New has become a power, and the 

 question to be settled is, the deflnition of its just claims, as against 

 the just claims of the Old. The past progress of education of civilized 

 nations has had its central point in the study of language. Language 

 is the great instrument through possession of which man is most dis- 

 tinctly separated from the lower animals ; through use of which he is 



^ From the preface to the recently-published German translation of Tyndall's " Frag- 

 ments of Science," revised by the writer, Pro£. Helmholtz, for Nature. 



