THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT IN ENGLAND. 



235 



in England, particularly with respect to the more difficult 

 and abstract sciences, we are much below other nations, 

 not merely of equal rank, but below several even of 

 inferior power." 



"It is," says the Edinburgh Ee viewer of 1816, 1 "cer- 

 tainly a curious problem with respect to national genius, 

 whence it arises that the country in Europe most gener- 

 ally acknowledged to abound in men of strong intellect 

 and sound judgment should for the last seventy or eighty 

 years have been inferior to so many of its neighbours in 

 the cultivation of that science which requires the most 

 steady and greatest exertions of understanding, and that 

 this relaxation should immediately follow the period when 

 the greatest of all mathematical discoveries had been made 

 in that same country." 



It must be said that these opinions, expressed as they 7. 

 were by men of the highest attainments, did not remain opinions on 



English 



unchallenged at home or unnoticed abroad. It will be 

 interesting to see how they have been met. Let us first 

 hear what Cuvier says in his filoge of Sir Joseph Banks 

 in 1 8 2 1 2 regarding the work of the Royal Society during 

 the period of forty-one years of his presidency : " During 

 this period, so memorable in the history of the human 

 mind, English philosophers have taken a part as glorious 

 as that of any other nation in those labours of the intel- 

 lect which are common to all civilised peoples : they have 

 faced the icy regions of both poles ; they have left no 

 corner unvisited in the two oceans ; they have increased 

 tenfold the catalogue of the kingdoms of nature ; the 



1 'Edinburgh Review,' 1816, vol. 

 xxvii. p. 98. 



2 See Cuvier, ' Eloges historiques, 

 vol. iii. p. 79. 



