496 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



or social domains, and perhaps we should except also the realm of 

 politics. To grasp and to establish the hitherto wanting but yet so 

 necessary harmony between being and thinking will probably be the 

 chief task of the century soon to come in. 



As regards the sciences thus far not mentioned (philosophy, 

 theology, jurisprudence), there is, to our knowledge, much move- 

 ment to be noticed, but comparatively little real progress. An ex- 

 ception must be made as to history, which as Kulturgeschichte 

 (history of civilization) has assumed a scientific character contrast- 

 ing markedly with its previous form. The same is true of the 

 history of religion, which has given a well-deserved attention to 

 the ancient Hindu religions, especially the venerable religion of 

 Buddha; furthermore, the successful study of antiquity, which, 

 especially in connection with a branch of physical science or geology 

 as archaeology, has furnished the most valuable disclosures as to pre- 

 historic times. Political economy, statistics, and hygiene also may 

 look back on their achievements with pride. The ethics of moral 

 science has also derived great profit from the revelations of physical 

 sciences on the gradual acquisition and transmission through hered- 

 ity of mental and moral qualities. The like can be said with even 

 more emphasis of general philology, which happily applied the 

 principles of the theory of evolution to the great problem of 

 the origin of languages, and proved that the laws according to 

 which species and languages originate, grow, and, through the 

 extinction of intermediate links, separate from each other, are 

 identical. 



Furthermore, in all domains of human knowledge, without 

 exception, a great number of important and valuable detail re- 

 searches have been made which, in their totality, also tend to raise 

 their respective sciences to a higher level. 



M. Ferdinand Brunetiere, the distinguished French critic, who re- 

 cently came to the United States to deliver a course of lectures, confesses to 

 having met some difficulties in a search he made to find a typical Ameri- 

 can. At Baltimore, as at New York, all that he observed of original or 

 local seemed to bear an element of cosmopolitanism. The " American " or 

 English professor of whom he borrowed a pencil was a German. A lady 

 whose manner, physiognomy, and language struck him as American, was 

 of French origin. Another person of " American " manners spent half the 

 year in Paris or Switzerland. The man who asked him how he liked Balti- 

 more was a Eussian. He found, too, Italians, Greeks, Jews, and what not, 

 of " American" aspect and manners, and wondered when he would meet an 

 American born in America of American parents, or who had not been sub- 

 ject to influences from abroad. " No," he says, " race has not in America 

 any more than in Europe the importance that is given it." 



