842 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



such harmless trifles ; but in the name 

 of Science let them not find admittance 

 into that honorable repository which 

 contains the works of Newton, Boyle, 

 Cavendish, and Herschel. . . . 



" From such a dull invention noth- 

 ing can be expected. It only removes 

 all the difficulties under which the 

 theory of light labored to the theory 

 of this new medium which assumes its 

 place. It is a change of name ; it 

 teaches no truthy reconciles no contra- 

 dictions, arranges no anomalous facts, 

 suggests no new experiments, and leads 

 to no new inquiries. It has not even 

 the pitiful merit of afibrding an agree- 

 able play of the fancy. It is infinitely 

 more useless and less ingenious than the 

 Indian theory of the elephant and the 

 tortoise. We have a right to demand 

 that the hypothesis shall be so consist- 

 ent with itself and so applicable to the 

 facts as not to require perpetual mend- 

 ing and patching — that the child which 

 we stoop to play with shall be tolerably 

 healthy, and not of the puny, sickly na- 

 ture of Dr. Young's productions which 

 have scarcely stamina to subsist until 

 the fruitful parent has furnished us with 

 a new litter ; to make way for which, 

 he knocks on the head or more bar- 

 barously exposes the first," 



This is certainly poor stuff, read in 

 the light of subsequent history. Of the 

 man so shamefully vilified by a reck- 

 less critic, Professor Helmholtz thus 

 speaks : " His was one of the most pro- 

 found minds that the world has ever 

 seen ; but he had the misfortune to be 

 too much in advance of his age. He 

 excited the wonder of his contempo- 

 raries, who, however, were unable to 

 follow him to the heights at which his 

 daring intellect was accustomed to soar. 

 His most important ideas lay, therefore, 

 buried and forgotten in the folios of the 

 Royal Society until a new generation 

 gradually and painfully made the same 

 discoveries, and proved the exactness 

 of his assertions and the truth of his 

 demonstrations." 



Nevertheless, the "Edinburgh Re- 

 view " had power to extinguish the in- 

 fluence of this extraordinary genius, and 

 it was the article from which we have 

 quoted that did the work. Rubbish as it 

 now appears, it was accepted as truth, 

 and the efiect was to close the channels 

 of reply to Dr. Young, and push him 

 into obscurity as nothing better than 

 a shallow pretender. As Professor Tyn- 

 dall remarks : " For twenty years this 

 man of genius was quenched — hidden 

 from the appreciative intellect of his 

 countrymen — deemed, in fact, a dream- 

 er, through the vigorous audacity of a 

 writer who had then possession of the 

 public ear, and who, in the ' Edinburgh 

 Review,' poured ridicule upon Young 

 and his speculations." 



Such was the power of base-mind- 

 ed criticism at the beginning of the 

 century; and such the first great ex- 

 ploit of the " Edinburgh Review " in 

 relation to the progress of scientific 

 thought. 



Eighty years have since passed away, 

 but the old Scotch quarterly has learned 

 nothing. Oblivious of the great changes 

 that have taken place in the world of 

 thought, it undertakes to repeat upon 

 Herbert Spencer the tactics which 

 proved so effectual in suppressing the 

 greatest scientific man of the opening 

 century. It will fail, and not only this, 

 but the absurd anomaly of its action 

 will be certain to defeat the end it 

 proposes to accomplish. There could 

 hardly be a greater compliment to the 

 work of Spencer than that the " Edin- 

 burgh Review " should at this time have 

 printed so incompetent and ridiculous 

 an assault upon it. 



The reviewer entitles his article 

 "The Spencerian Philosophy," but it 

 is false to its title in that it makes not 

 the slightest attempt to deal with that 

 philosophy. It sho^s no appreciation 

 of it, and conveys no shadow of an idea 

 of its real character. The discussion is 

 confined to "First Principles," the open- 

 ing volume of the philosophical sys- 



