OUR WONDERFUL GENERATION 



means all of the remarkable achievements here list- 

 ed. They are recapitulated here in epitome chiefly 

 by way of summary, but also to name a few accom- 

 plishments that for one reason or another have not 

 fallen within the scope of our present inquiry. 



And now, in concluding a summary which explic- 

 itly disclaims any attempt at completeness, I perhaps 

 cannot do better than to apply to the foregoing pages 

 the words with which I closed a chapter in a volume 

 of my work on The Wonders of Science in Modern 

 Life, of which chapter the present volume might be 

 said to be an amplification. I make the quotation 

 with slight adaptations to apply to the volume in 

 hand: 



"Let it be noted that the most ancient of the dis- 

 coveries with which we have dealt date from about 

 the middle of the last decade of the nineteenth cen- 

 tury. In other words, the period involved is only 

 about eighteen years. Indeed the great body of rev- 

 olutionary accomplishments in question were brought 

 to light within the space of the single decade 1895- 

 1904. It is startling to reflect on the number of new 

 ideas that were added to the sum total of human 

 knowledge in that period. 



"Let us recall, by way of illustration, that two of 

 the most learned and most versatile men of science of 

 the nineteenth century, John Tyndall and Thomas 

 Henry Huxley, died respectively in 1893 and 1895. 

 The time is so recent that the names of these men 

 have not ceased to be household words. Yet if these 

 two men, whose joint knowledge covered every field 

 of physical and biological science, could come back 



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