NATURAL SCIENCE TO GENERAL SCIENCE. 3 



extinct; and there opens out before us an expanse of knowledge the 

 contemplation of which may well bewilder us. In all these sciences 

 the range of investigation widens as fast as the means of obser- 

 vation improve. The zoologists of past times were content to 

 have described the teeth, the hair, the feet, and other external 

 characteristics of an animal. The anatomist, on the other hand, 

 confined himself to human anatomy, so far as he could make 

 it out by the help of the knife, the saw, and the scalpel, with 

 the occasional aid of injections of the vessels. Human anatomy 

 then passed for an unusually extensive and difficult study. Now 

 we are no longer satisfied with the comparatively rough science 

 which bore the name of human anatomy, and which, though 

 without reason, was thought to be almost exhausted. We 

 have added to it comparative anatomy that is, the anatomy 

 of all animals and microscopic anatomy, both of them sciences 

 of infinitely wider range, which now absorb the interest of 

 students. 



The four elements of the ancients and of mediaeval alchemy 

 have been increased to sixty-four, the last four of which are 

 due to a method invented in our own University, which pro- 

 mises still further discoveries. l But not merely is the number 

 of the elements far greater, the methods of producing compli- 

 cated combinations of them have been so vastly improved, that 

 what is called organic chemistry, which embraces only com- 

 pounds of carbon with oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and a few 

 other elements, has already taken rank as an independent 

 science. 



' As the stars of heaven for multitude ' was in ancient times 

 the natural expression for a number beyond our comprehension, 

 Pliny even thinks it almost presumption (' rem etiam Deo im- 

 probam') on the part of Hipparchus to have undertaken to 

 count the stars and to determine their relative positions. And 

 yet none of the catalogues up to the seventeenth centuiy, con- 

 structed without the aid of telescopes, give more than from 



1 That is the method of spectrum analysis, due to Bunscn and Kirchoft', both 

 of Heidelberg. The elements alluded to are caesium, rubidium, thallium, and 

 iridium. 



B2 



