26 SELECTIONS FROM HUXLEY 



wheel turns round very fast. How useful for carters and gig 

 drivers to know something about this ; and how good were it, 

 if any ingenious person would find out the cause of such phe- 

 nomena, and thence educe a general remedy for them. Such 

 5 an ingenious person was Count Rumford; and he and his 

 successors have landed us in the theory of the persistence, or 

 indestructibility, of force. And in the infinitely minute, as 

 in the infinitely great, the seekers after natural knowledge of 

 the kinds called physical and chemical, have everywhere 



10 found a definite order and succession of events which seem 

 never to be infringed. 



And how has it fared with "Physick" and Anatomy? 

 Have the anatomist, and physiologist, or the physician, 

 whose business it has been to devote themselves assiduously 



15 to that eminently practical and direct end, the alleviation of 

 the sufferings of mankind, have they been able to confine 

 their vision more absolutely to the strictly useful? I fear 

 they are worst offenders of all. For if the astronomer has 

 set before us the infinite magnitude 'of space, and the practi- 



20 cal eternity of the duration of the universe ; if the physical 

 and chemical philosophers have demonstrated the infinite 

 minuteness of its constituent parts, and the practical eternity 

 of matter and of force ; and if both have alike proclaimed the 

 universality of a definite and predicable order and succession 



25 of events, the workers in biology have not only accepted all 

 these, but have added more startling theses of their own. 

 For, as the astronomers discover in the earth no center of the 

 universe, but an eccentric speck, so the naturalists find man to 

 be no center of the living world, but one amidst endless modi- 



30 fications of life ; and as the astronomer observes the mark 

 of practically endless time set upon the arrangements of the 

 solar system so the student of life finds the records of ancient 

 forms of existence peopling the world for ages, which, in rela- 

 tion to human experience, are infinite. 



