30 A Century of Science 



The practical uses of electricity are introducing 

 new features into the whole subject of molecular 

 physics, and in this region, I suspect, we are to 

 look for some of the most striking disclosures of 

 the immediate future. 



A word must be said of the historical sciences, 

 which have witnessed as great changes as any 

 others, mainly through the introduction of the com 

 parative method of inquiry. The first two great 

 triumphs of the comparative method were achieved 

 contemporaneously in two fields of inquiry very 

 remote from one another : the one was the work 

 of Cuvier, above mentioned ; the other was the 

 founding of the comparative philology of the Ar 

 yan languages by Franz Bopp, in 1816. The work 

 of Bopp exerted as powerful an influence through 

 out all the historical fields of study as Cuvier ex 

 erted in biology. The young men whose minds 

 were receiving their formative impulses between 

 1825 and 1840, under the various influences of 

 Cuvier and Saint-Hilaire, Lyell, Goethe, Bopp, 

 and other such great leaders, began themselves 

 to come to the foreground as leaders of thought 

 about 1860 : on the one hand, such men as Dar 

 win, Gray, Huxley, and Wallace ; on the other 

 hand, such as Kuhn and Schleicher, Maine, Mau- 

 rer, Mommsen, Freeman, and Tylor. The point 



