26 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Few of the great men who have helped to make our century 

 memorable in the history of thought are witnesses of its end, and 

 all who have profited by the labors of Wallace will rejoice that 

 he has been permitted to stand on the threshold of a new century, 

 and, reviewing the past, to give us his impressions of the wonder- 

 ful century. 



AVe men of the nineteenth century, he says, have not been 

 slow to praise it. The wise and the foolish, the learned and the 

 unlearned, the poet and the pressman, the rich and the poor, alike 

 Bwell the chorus of admiration for the marvelous inventions and 

 discoveries of our own age, and especially for those innumerable 

 applications of science which now form part of our daily life, and 

 which remind us every hour of our immense superiority over our 

 comparatively ignorant forefathers. 



Our century, he tells us, has been characterized by a marvelous 

 and altogether unprecedented progress in the knowledge of the 

 universe and of its complex forces, and also in the application of 

 that knowledge to an infinite variety of purposes calculated, if 

 properly utilized, to supply all the wants of every human being 

 and to add greatly to the comforts, the enjoyments, and the re- 

 finements of life. The bounds of human knowledge have been 

 so far extended that new vistas have opened to us in nearly all 

 directions where it had been thought that we could never pene- 

 trate, and the more we learn the more we seem capable of learn- 

 ing in the ever-widening expanse of the universe. It may, he says, 

 be truly said of the men of science that they have become as gods 

 knowing good and evil, since they have been able not only to utilize 

 the most recondite powers of Nature in their service, but have in 

 many cases been able to discover the sources of much of the evil 

 that afflicts humanity, to abolish pain, to lengthen life, and to add 

 immensely to the intellectual as well as the physical enjoyments 

 of our race. 



In order to get any adequate measure for comparison with the 

 nineteenth century we must take not any preceding century, but 

 the whole preceding epoch of human history. We must take into 

 consideration not only the changes effected in science, in the arts, 

 in the possibilities of human intercourse, and in the extension of 

 our knowledge both of the earth and of the whole visible universe, 

 but the means our century has furnished for future advancement. 



Our author, who has borne such a distinguished part in the 

 intellectual progress of our century, shows clearly that in means 

 for the discovery of truth, for the extension of our control over 

 l^ature, and for the alleviation of the ills that beset mankind, the 

 inheritance of the twentieth centurv from the nineteenth will be 



