NATURAL SCIENCE TO GENERAL SCIENCE. 6 



Add to this, in history, the study of original documents, 

 the critical examination of parchments and papers accumu- 

 lated in the archives of states and of towns ; the combi- 

 nation of details scattered up and down in memoirs, in 

 correspondence, and in biographies ; the deciphering of 

 hieroglyphics and cuneiform inscriptions ; in natural 

 history the more and more comprehensive classification 

 of minerals, plants, and animals, as well living as extinct ; 

 and there opens out before us an expanse of knowledge 

 the contemplation of which may well bewilder us. In all 

 these sciences the range of investigation widens as fast as 

 the means of observation improve. The zoologists of past 

 times were content to have described the teeth, the hair, 

 the feet, and other external characteristics of an animal. 

 The anatomist, on the other hand, confined himself to 

 human anatomy, so far as he could make it out by the 

 help of the knife, the saw, and the scalpel, with the 

 occasional aid of injections of the vessels. Human 

 anatomy then passed for an unusually extensive and diffi- 

 cult study. Now we are no longer satisfied with the 

 comparatively rpugh science which bore the name of 

 human anatomy, and which, though without reason, was 

 thought to be almost exhausted. We have added to it 

 comparative anatomy — that is, the anatomy of all animals 

 — and microscopic anatomy, both of them sciences of 

 infinitely wider range, which now absorb the interest of 

 students. 



The four elements of the ancients and of mediaeval 

 alchemy have been increased to sixty-four, the last four 

 of which are due to a method invented in our own 

 University, which promises still further discoveries.^ But 



' That is the method of spectrum analysis, due to Bunsen and Kirchoff, 

 both of Heidelberg. The elements alluded to are caesium rubidium, 

 tha!liu7n, and iridium. 



