120 FAMOUS SCOTS 



Stewart. Natural Science seemed to be taking its 

 place, and the British Association movement lent 

 impetus to the new regime. Sedgwick, Buckland, 

 Murchison, Owen, and others, followed by Huxley 

 and Tyndall, appeared to herald the advent of an age 

 when the most difficult problems could be read off the 

 book of Nature, and the public turned eagerly from 

 the Babel of the philosophers to the men of the new 

 school in a sort of expectation of a royal road to 

 learning, without missing their way in theological 

 jungle or ' skirting the howling wastes ' of metaphysics. 

 Needless to say, the hopes were no more realised than 

 were the expectations of a golden age of material 

 prosperity in the wake of the Reform Bill. The 

 problem of man and his destiny remains as rooted as 

 ever, and the metaphysician has not been dislodged. 

 The old battle of the evidences had been fought in the 

 domain of mental science, and when transferred to the 

 natural sciences the fight was not productive of the 

 expected results. The times, as Richter said, were 

 indeed ' a criticising critical time, hovering between 

 the wish and the ability to believe, a chaos of con- 

 flicting times : but even a chaotic world must have its 

 centre, and revolve round that centre : there is no pure 

 entire confusion, but all such presupposes its opposite, 

 before it can begin.' In Scotland and in England the 

 great ecclesiastical currents of the Disruption and the 

 Oxford Movement had left the nation for a time weary 

 of theology, and the school of natural science was in 



