The Gifts of Science 



127 



through fear, and the plague or the cholera or the black 

 death swept them from the earth in millions. But who 

 fears cholera now ? Even yellow fever is controlled and 

 will one day be eradicated even in its miasmatic haunts. 

 Our appeal is from dirty Cuba to clean Cuba ; from filthy 

 Porto Rico to Porto Rico washed and redeemed. Twenty 

 years ago seven per cent of mothers died of puerperal 

 fever, and the mortality in diphtheria was seventy-five 

 per cent ; to-day the mortality among mothers is said to be 

 less than one-twentieth of one per cent and that of diph- 

 theria less than seven per cent. And who shall estimate 

 the incalculable service rendered to the world by antisep- 

 tic surgery: gangrene has been well-nigh banished from 

 the hospitals of the world and surgical operations are 

 every day performed with absolute safety, which in days 

 past we had never dared dream of undertaking. 



These are some of the ways in which modern science 

 repays the world for her cost ; these are some of the vis- 

 ible, tangible dividends shared in by everybody, and to 

 greater or less extent patent to us all. But there is an- 

 other side of our modern human life where the contribu- 

 tions of science have been of no less tremendous moment. 

 Great as has been the service of scientific labor in the 

 world of industry, the world of economics, the healing 

 art, even greater yet has been its influence in the world 

 of thought. We are too near in time to estimate this ser- 

 vice at its full, but as a matter of fact, the contributions 

 of modern science to human thinking have been not only 

 immense in themselves, but in all other lines of intellec- 

 tual effort have been, as we shall see, absolutely revolu- 

 tionary. 



