672 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1909. 
save that of pursuing knowledge for its own sake, or, if they have a 
profession, it is that of the teacher, which, indeed, they can hardly 
avoid. Ought such men, working with such objects, to find a place 
in the Imperial College? 
It is a curious thing, but it has only comparatively recently been 
realized, that a sound and exact knowledge of phenomena was neces- 
sary for man. The realization of this fact, in the modern world at 
any rate, occurred at the end of the middle ages; it was one of the 
intellectual preducts of the Renaissance, and in this country Francis 
Bacon was its first exponent. In his “Advancement of learning ” he 
explained the methods by which the increase of knowledge was pos- 
sible, and advocated the promotion of knowledge to a new and in- 
fluential position in the organization of human society. In Italy 
the same idea was taught by the great philosopher, Giordano 
Bruno, who held that the whole universe was a vast mechan- 
ism of which man, and the earth on which man dwells, was a 
portion, and that the working of this mechanism, though not the full 
~ comprehension of it, was open to the investigation of man. For pro- 
mulgating this impious view both he and his book were burned at 
Rome in 1600. You will find the same idea cropping up continually. 
in the written records of that time; Copernicus gave it practical 
recognition when he demonstrated the real relation of the earth to 
the sun, and it was thoroughly grasped by our own Shakespeare, who 
gave it expression in the dialogue between Perdita and Polixenes in 
the Winter’s Tale: 
Perdita. The fairest flowers o’ the season 
Are our carnations, and streak’d gillyvors 
Which some call nature’s bastards: of that kind 
Our rustic garden’s barren; and I care not 
To get slips of them. 
Polixenes. Wherefore, gentle maiden, do you neglect them? 
Perdita. For I have heard it said 
There is an art which, in their piedness, shares 
With great creating nature. 
Polisenes. Say there be: | 
Yet nature is made better by no mean, 
But nature makes that mean: so, o’er that art 
Which you say adds to nature, is an art 
That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry 
A gentler scion to the wildest stock and make conceive a bark of 
baser kind 
By bud of nobler race: this is an art 
Which does mend nature,—change it rather; but 
The art itself is nature.@ 
“This is an intensely interesting passage, for it shows that Shakespeare had 
grasped the idea of evolution, the idea, that is to say, that nature contains 
within herself the power of altering or “mending” herself. The interest is 
