THE century's GREAT MEN IN SCIENCE. 699 



ground in geology, William Herschel, Kant, and Laplace did great 

 things in astronomy. In the nineteenth century geology was fir.st 

 really made a science, and among its great men one recalls at once 

 Lyell, Agassiz, Kelvin. This country has become its home. In astron- 

 omy, too, this country has been eminent, especially in the new astronomy 

 which has afforded the needed scope for greatness, instead of the nar- 

 row rut that Bessel and Argclander had left behind them. 'J^hus it 

 happens that we have a magnificent group of great astronomers living 

 among us to-day. We stand too close to them to take in their true 

 proportions. But it is certain that the names of Chandler, Langley, 

 Newcomb, Pickering, and several others are indelibly inscribed upon 

 the heavens. In England it is only this year that Sir Norman Lockycr 

 has brought the extraordinary research to which his life has been 

 devoted to completion, so far as such work can be .said to be capa))le 

 of completion. It is an attribute of its greatness that it is endless. 



When we compare all the men I have glanced at. with a v'ww to 

 eliciting a common trait somewhat distinctive of the nineteenth ccn- 

 tur}", we can not ))ut see that science has been animated l)y a new 

 spirit, till the very word has become a misnomer. It is the man of 

 science, eager to have his ever}' opinion regenerated, his every idea 

 rationalized, by drinking at the fountain of fact, and devoting all the 

 energies of his life to the cult of truth, not as he understands it, but 

 as he does not yet understand it, that ought propcn*!}' to be called a 

 philosopher. To an earlier age knowledge was power, merely that 

 and nothing more; to us it is life and the summum bonum. Emanci- 

 pation from the bonds of self, of one's own prepossessions, imiK)rtu- 

 nately sought at the hands of that rational power before which all 

 must ultimately bow— this is the characteristic that distinguishes all 

 the great figures of the nineteenth-century science from those of former 

 periods. 



