168 THE GROWTH OF SCIENCE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 



the connection of electricity with the phenomena of living- bodies. 

 Possibly one of them was exciting the rest by telling how he had just 

 heard that a professor at Pavia, one Volta, had discovered that electric- 

 ity could })e produced not only by rubbing together particular bodies, 

 but b}' the simple contact of two metals, and had thereby explained 

 Galvani's remarkable results. For, indeed, as we shall hear from Pro- 

 fessor Fleming, it was in that very year. 1799, that electricity as we 

 now know it took its birth. It was then that Volta brought to light 

 the apparently simple truths out of which so much has sprung. The 

 world, it is true, had to wait for yet some twenty years before both 

 the practical and theoretic worth of Volta's discover^" became truly 

 pregnant under the fertilizing influence of another discovery. The 

 loadstone and magnetic virtues had, like the electrifying power of 

 rubbed amber, long been an old story. But, save for the compass, 

 not much had come from it. And even Volta's discovery might have 

 long remained relatively barren had it been left to itself. When, how- 

 ever, in 1819, Oersted made known his remarkable observations on 

 the relations of electricity to magnetism, he made the contact needed 

 for the flow of a new current of ideas. And it is perhaps not too 

 much to say that those ideas, developing during the 3'ears of the rest 

 of the century with an ever-accelerating swiftness, have wholly changed 

 man's material relations to the circumstances of life, and at the same 

 time carried him far in his knowledge of the nature of things. 



Of all the various ])ranches of science, none perhaps is to-day, none 

 for these many years past has been, so well known to, even if not 

 understood by, most people as that of geology. Its practical lessons 

 have brought wealth to many; its fairy tales have brought delight to 

 more; and round it hovers the charm of danger, for the conclusions to 

 which it needs touch on the nature of man's beginning. 



In 1799 the science of geology, as we now know it. Was struggling 

 into birth. There had been from of old cosmogonies, theories as to how 

 the world had taken shape out of primeval chaos. In that fresh spirit 

 which marked the zealous search after natural knowledge pursued in 

 the middle and latter part of the seventeenth century, the brilliant 

 Stenson, in Italy, and Hooke, in our own country, had laid hold of 

 some of the problems presented by fossil remains, and Woodward, 

 with others, had labored in the same field. In the eighteenth centur3^ 

 especially in its latter half, men's minds were busy about the physical 

 agencies determining or modifying the features of the earth's crust; 

 water and fire, subsidence from a primeval ocean and transformation 

 by outbursts of the central heat, Neptune and Pluto, were being 

 appealed to, by Werner on the one hand and b}" Desmarest on the 

 other, in explanation of the earth's phenomena. The way was being 

 prepared, theories and views were abundant, and many sound observa- 

 tions had been made; and yet the science of geology, properly so 



