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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



to the investigation of the Foraminifcra and growing out of it, was 

 the part which he took in the discussions respecting the nature of 

 Eozoon Canadense, in which he maintained that the fossil in question 

 exhibits the distinctive structure of the shell-substance of the higher 

 Foraminiferce. He was preparing a memoir on this subject, which he 

 left uncompleted at the time of his death. 



Dr. Carpenter, with Professor Wyville Thomson, w^as one of the 

 prime movers of the expeditions for deep-sea research, which have 

 since been so extensively carried on, and have resulted in so great and 

 valuable additions to our knowledge of zoology and the physics of the 

 globe. He took part in the earlier expeditions in 1868 and subsequent 

 years, but was not able to go on the Challenger Expedition. He had 

 an important part, however, in collating and formulating the results 

 of the last expedition, and in making them accessible to the understand- 

 ing of the public. To this series of investigations belong his theories 

 and publications on ocean-currents. 



In 1872 Dr. Carpenter was President of the British Association, at 

 its Bristol meeting, and had the pleasure of announcing in his inaugu- 

 ral address the approaching departure of the Challenger on a circum- 

 navigating expedition of at least three years' duration. The subject of 

 his address was " Man as the Interpreter of Nature," and its purpose 

 was to lead the minds of his audience " to the consideration of the 

 mental processes by which are formed those fundamental concep- 

 tions of matter and force, of cause and effect, of law and order, 

 which furnish the basis of all scientific reasoning, and constitute 

 the pJiilosophia x>rima of Bacon " ; and to show " that those who set 

 up their own conceptions of the orderly sequence which they discern 

 in the phenomena of nature, as fixed and determinate laws, by which 

 those phenomena not only are within all human experience, but always 

 have been and always must be governed, are guilty of the intellectual 

 arrogance they condemn in the systems of the ancients, and place them- 

 selves in diametrical antagonism to those real philosophers, by whose 

 comprehensive grasp and penetrating insight that order has so far been 

 disclosed." At the close of his address, having shown how man had 

 arrived at the recognition of the unity of the power of which the phe- 

 nomena of nature are the diversified manifestations, and how all sci- 

 entific inquiry now tends toward this point, he declared that the science 

 of modern times had taken a more special direction : " Fixing its at- 

 tention exclusively on the order of nature, it has separated itself wholly 

 from theology, whose function it is to seek after its cause. In this, 

 science is fully justified, alike by the entire independence of its objects, 

 and by the historical fact that it has been continually hampered and 

 impeded, in its search for the truth as it is in nature, by the restraints 

 which theologians have attempted to impose upon its inquiries. But 

 when science, passing beyond its own limits, assumes to take the place 

 of theology, and sets up its own conception of the order of nature as a 



