546 



KNOWLEDGE 



[Apeil 2i>, 1882. 



tlioy far rradicr to believe in a law like that of universal 

 <^i-avitation, opi'iatiiij,' througliout regions of space practi- 

 '•ally without limit, tliaii to perceive (what this in fact 

 iuiplii^d) that in time, as in space, the domain of law 

 must be to our conceptions — limitless. 



It came, therefore, as a shock even to many of the more 

 thoughtful among us, when Darwin propounded a law of 

 Nature, less grand than Newton's great law, in that instead 

 of ranging visibly throughout inKnitudes of space, it dealt 

 only with the families of living creatures inhabiting this 

 earth, but grander in relation to time (or rather in its 

 more obvious relation to time), in that it requind us to 

 believe in processes of development operating throughout 

 tens and hundreds of thousands — nay, throughout millions 

 of years. Men were not prepared to extend on a sudden 

 their conceptions of time in the same degree, or in any- 

 thing like the same degree, that they had perforce 

 (;xtended their conceptions of space. The more pro- 

 found, indeed, had already seen that this was only 

 a logical consequence of the widening of our ideas 

 of space, — that the vastness of (Jod's domain involved 

 its correspoiidingly extended duration. But Darwin was 

 the first to gi\e definite tangible evidence of the prac- 

 tically infinite extension of time during which the processes 

 going on all around us have gone on in the past, and (pre- 

 sumably) will go on in the future. The universe, as 

 Newton presented it, might have been framed in a second 

 by an Almighty Being, to last an hour, or a year, or a 

 century, and then to be replaced by soma new order of 

 things ; though everything in it, even as thus presented, 

 suggests that in duration, as in e.\tent, it was, and is, 

 and will be infinite to our conceptions. But Darwin 

 showed the traces of long-past a?ons, of long-past wons of 

 reons, traces affording evidence as clear to the eye of science 

 as is the evidence of the vastness of space afforded by the 

 faint rays of telescopic stars. 



I do not know whether the grandeur of the universe, as 

 pictured by Newtonian astronomy, or the vastness of past 

 and future time, as pictured by the Darwinian system, is 

 the more impressive. Certainly there can be imagined 

 nothing much more wonderful than those vast depths of 

 space in which we are absolutely compelled to believe since 

 Newton established the great law which bears his name. 

 But if there is aught grander than this, aught more solemn 

 in its impressiveness, it is the thought of the immeasurable 

 vistas of past time, during which the races inhabiting 

 earth came into being under the action of the laws 

 assigned to them ; the still vaster time-intervals belonging 

 to the generation of systems of worlds ; the periods so vast 

 that we cannot regard them otherwise than as infinite, 

 during which not solar systems, but whole galaxies of such 

 systems, and systems of such galaxies — naj', higher and 

 higher orders of such systems, absolutely without end, as 

 without beginning — came into existence. 



That this widening of our conceptions of time as of 

 space, and thence the widening of our ideas as to tSie 

 domain of law, and consequently the recognition of the 

 infinitely perfect natvre of the laws of the universe (for 

 only very excellent laws can work for long, and only per- 

 fect laws can work for ever) should have been regarded as 

 antagonistic to religion in its wider and nobler sense, can 

 only be regarded as resulting from the blindness, or the 

 perversity, or the wrong-headedness, of the ignorant. That 

 some of the fancies of dogmatic religion, some parts 

 of the complex systems which the Rabbinistic type 

 of erudition has invented in all religions, should 

 seem incompatible with these developments of our 

 knowledge and still wider enlargements of our concep- 

 tions, can be understood. But that religion, in which 



all men may (in which all reasoning men nwM) agree, has 

 been rendered infinitely grander — infinitely more impres- 

 sive by our new knowledge. It has also been rendered 

 infinitely more reasonable. Men had spoken of God as 

 Omnipresent and Almighty, but they had a.ssigned a mere 

 point in space as his domain ; they had described him as 

 Eternal, but they had recognised his influence as existing 

 for the merest second of time ; and finally they had in 

 words attributed all Wisdom to Him, while in fact they 

 had limited His wisdom to the provision of laws 

 capable of operating but imperfectly, and for a brief 

 period. Science shows now the infinite domain of 

 the Omnipresent, its inconceivably vast duration, the 

 perfection of the laws which so ^ rule it that they 

 operate throughout all space and all time. Yet a few 

 who cannot raise their eyes from this petty earth to the 

 heavens, or extend their thoughts to perceive the perfec- 

 Aon of the laws governing a universe for all time (as we 

 know time) find no nobler teaching in these grandest reve- 

 lations of science than that " God is set on one side in the 

 name of universal evolution." It is as though men who 

 had observed but the working of a clock's escapement 

 should regard the discovery of the train of wheels leading to 

 the escapement-wheel proof positive that no reasoning mind 

 had fashioned the mechanism. That which the bigoted on 

 either side, the religious and the irreligious fanatic alike, 

 agree in regarding as the disproof — if admitted — of a Being 

 working " in and through all things," affords in reality the 

 most overwhelming evidence, the solemnest demonstration 

 that such a Being exists : though science must say of Him 

 now as was said of old by Elihu, " as touching the Almighty 

 we cannot find him out." 



CONSUMPTION.* 



Bt Prof. Tyxdall. 



ON Iklarch 24, 1882, an address of very serious public 

 import was delivered by Dr. Koch before the 

 Physiological Society of Berlin. It touches a question in 

 which we are all at present interested — that of experi- 

 mental physiology — and I may, therefore, be permitted to 

 give some account of it in the Times. The address, a copy 

 of which has been courteously sent to me by its author, is 

 entitled "The Etiology of Tubercular Disease." Koch 

 first made himself known by the penetration, skill, and 

 thoroughness of his researches on the contagium of splenic 

 fever. By a process of inoculation and infection he traced 

 this terrible parasite through all its stages of development 

 and through its various modes of action. This masterly 

 investigation caused the young physician to be transferred 

 from a modest country practice, in the neighbourhood of 

 Breslau, to the post of Government Adviser in the 

 Imperial Health Department of Berlin. 



From this department has lately issued a most im- 

 portant series of investigations on tlie etiology of infective 

 disordei's. Koch's last inquiry deals with a disease which, 

 in point of mortality, stands at the head of them all. If, 

 he says, the seriousness of a malady be measured by the 

 number of its victims, then the most dreaded pests which 

 have hitherto ravaged the world — plague and cholera 

 included — must stand far behind the one now under con- 

 sideration. Koch makes the startling statement that one- 

 seventh of the deaths of the human race are due to 

 tubercular disease, while fully one-third of those who 

 die in active middle age are carried off by the same 



* On account of its importance, we assign to this letter by Prof. 

 Tyndall a place in the section of Knowledge usually devoted to 

 original commnnications only. — Ed. 



