THE EYE OF A PHILOSOPHER 



Such a life and such a character this volume will por- 

 tray. To a great extent it is based upon Dana's own 

 writings, his correspondence and his books. The esti- 

 mate put upon his career by those most competent to 

 judge of it will be fully stated, and afterwards will follow 

 a selection of the letters exchanged with men of science. 



For Dana we may claim an honorable rank in the com- 

 pany to which Linnaeus, Cuvier, Darwin, and Agassiz 

 belonged, men who excelled in special, patient, and 

 prolonged investigation, yet who also had the power, un- 

 trammelled by the scrutiny of specimens, to take broad 

 views of nature and her laws, and who thus became to 

 their contemporaries the philosophical interpreters of that 

 small portion of the cosmos which comes within the 

 cognizance of man. 



In the life of Benjamin Jowett, the Master of Balliol 

 College in the University of Oxford, an extract is given 

 from one of his sermons which seems to express the senti- 

 ments of Professor Dana so concisely that it will be here 

 quoted. If it were written as an estimate of the Ameri- 

 can geologist it could hardly be more appropriate. 



" Let us imagine some one, I will not say a little lower 

 than the angels, but a natural philosopher, who is capable 

 of seeing creation, not with our imperfect and hazy fancies, 

 but with a real scientific insight into the world in which 

 we live. He would behold the hand of law everywhere: 

 in the least things as well as in the greatest; in the most 

 complex as well as in the simplest ; in the life of man as 

 well as in the animals; extending to organic as well as to 

 inorganic substances; in all the consequences, combina- 

 tions, adaptations, motives, and intentions of nature. 

 He would recognize the same law and order, one and 

 continuous, in all these different spheres of knowledge; 

 in all the different realms of nature; through all time, 

 over all space. He would confess, too, that the actions 

 of men and the workings of the mind are inseparable from 

 the physical incidents or accompaniments which prepare 

 the way for them or co-operate with them, and that they 



