THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 41 



and south, but not the preceding and following." l He 

 called it the Front-view, meaning that he tilted the 

 mirror a little at the bottom, and, dispensing with 

 Newton's plane mirror at the object end, secured all 

 the light he could. 



At that epoch in the world's history there was a 

 singular upheaval of human thought and effort. In 

 the years between 1760 and 1785 the world may be 

 said to have witnessed more surprising changes than any 

 it experienced since the revival of letters and the dis- 

 covery of America. James Cook, aided by Joseph Banks 

 and other men like himself, discovered new lands or 

 new worlds of great extent and beauty in the bosom 

 of the ocean ; William Herschel, as the famous astro- 

 nomer Lalande expressed it, " displayed a new heaven 

 to earth," and discovered seventy-five millions of sunny 

 stars. James Watt had solved the problem of convert- 

 ing the unruly giant of Steam into an obedient slave of 

 man the beginning of endless improvements in the 

 bettering of man's lot. Gibbon had begun his Decline 

 and Fall, Robertson was writing his Histories, and 

 Hume was stirring the whole world of thought by the 

 boldness and novelty of his ideas. Even in the political 

 sphere that period was a seedtime fruitful of changes. 

 The new world had changed hands. The Anglo-Saxon 

 race and language had triumphed ; the future of North 

 America at least was assured. So was the future of 

 India to the same hardy stock. Voltaire and his 

 fellow-workers were paving the way for the violent 

 upheaval that soon came in Europe. Everywhere men 

 were sowing the seeds of a harvest of progress and 

 blessing, mixed and disfigured with many a root of 



1 Phil. Trans, for 1786, p. 499. 



