17 



SCIENTIFIC SIDE-LIGHTS 



Adjustment 

 Advance 



insects in the world would be, in [his] judg- 

 ment, a moderate estimate." The largest 

 previous estimate, by Sharp and Walsing- 

 ham, 2,000,000, was termed by Riley "ex- 

 tremely low." GILL Address before the Am. 

 Assoc. for the Advancement of Science, 

 Smithsonian Report for 1896, pp. 457-483. 



81. ADVANCE IN SCIENCE The Joy 



of Its Study Alike in All Ages. Each of 

 these epochs of the contemplation of the ex- 

 ternal world the earliest dawn of thought 

 and the advanced stage of civilization has 

 its own source of enjoyment. In the former, 

 this enjoyment, in accordance with the sim- 

 plicity of the primitive ages, flowed from an 

 intuitive feeling of the order that was pro- 

 claimed by the invariable and successive re- 

 appearance of the heavenly bodies, and by 

 the progressive development of organized 

 beings; while in the latter, this sense of 

 enjoyment springs from a definite knowl- 

 edge of the phenomena of nature. When 

 man began to interrogate nature, and, not 

 content with observing, learned to evoke 

 phenomena under definite conditions; when 

 once he sought to collect and record facts, in 

 order that the fruit of his labors might aid 

 investigation after his own brief existence 

 had passed away, the philosophy of nature 

 cast aside the vague and poetic garb in 

 which she had been enveloped from her 

 origin, and, having assumed a severer as- 

 pect, she now weighs the value of observa- 

 tions, and substitutes induction and reason- 

 ing for conjecture and assumption. HUM- 

 BOLDT Cosmos, vol. i, int., p. 24. (H., 1897.) 



82. ADVANCE IN TYPE None Since 

 the Mammalia Were Reached The Mothers 

 Stand Now at the Top. What was that 

 pinnacle? There is no more instructive 

 question in science. For the answer brings 

 into relief one of the expression-points of 

 nature one of these great teleological notes 

 of which the natural order is so full, and of 

 which this is by far the most impressive. 

 Run the eye for a moment up the scale of 

 animal life. At the bottom are the first 

 animals, the Protozoa. The Ccelenterata fol- 

 low, then in mixed array the Echinoderms. 

 Worms, and Mollusks. Above these come 

 the Pisces, then the Amphibia, then the 

 Reptilia, then the Aves, then what? The 

 Mammalia, THE MOTHERS. There the series 

 stops. Nature has never made anything 

 since. DBTJMMOND A scent of Man, p. 267. 

 (J. P., 1900.) 



83. ADVANCE OF CIVILIZATION 



Epoch-making Ideas. Those are happy 

 hours to most of us when we recall the days 

 of childhood. To trace the lives of cele- 

 brated men and women to the springs of 

 their moral and intellectual pow r er brings 

 never-fading delight. To study the rise and 

 progress of a nation or any social unit is 

 worthy of exalted minds. But the most 

 profitable inquiry of all is the search for the 

 origin of epoch-making ideas in order to 



comprehend the history of civilization, to- 

 con jure up those race memories in which 

 each people transmits to itself and to pos- 

 terity its former experiences. MASON The 

 Birth of Invention (Address at Centenary 

 of American Patent System, Washington, 

 1891, proceedings), p. 403. 



84. ADVANCE OF GLACIERS IN RE- 

 CENT TIMES Road Buried under Ice. 

 We have ample traditional evidence of the 

 oscillations of glacier-boundaries in recent 

 times. During the religious Tvars of the six- 

 teenth century, when the Catholics gained 

 the ascendency in the Canton of Valais, the 

 inhabitants of the upper valleys adhered to 

 the Protestant faith. Shut out from ordi- 

 nary communication with the Protestant 

 churches by the Bernese Oberland, the ac- 

 count states that these peasants braved 

 every obstacle to the exercise of their re- 

 ligion, and used to carry their children over 

 a certain road by the valley of Viesch, 

 across the Alps, to be baptized at Grindel- 

 wald, on the farther side of the glaciers of 

 Aletsch and Viesch. I could not understand 

 this statement, for no such road exists, or 

 could be conceived possible at present; nor 

 was there any knowledge of it among the 

 guides, intimate as they are with every 

 feature of the region. Impressed, however, 

 with the idea that there must be some foun- 

 dation for the statement, I carefully exam- 

 ined the ground, and, penetrating under the 

 glacier of Aletsch, I actually found, a num- 

 ber of feet below the present level of the ice, 

 the paved road along which these hardy 

 people traveled to church with their chil- 

 dren, and some traces of which are still 

 visible. It has been almost completely 

 buried, altho here and there it reap- 

 pears; but at this day it is completely im- 

 passable for ordinary travel. AGASSIZ 

 Geological Sketches, ser. ii, p. 16. (H. 

 M. & Co., 1896.) 



85. ADVANCE OF INTELLECT PRE- 

 PARES FOR NEW DISCOVERY A Great 

 Period Sustains Great Men. All great dis- 

 coveries are duly prepared for in two ways: 

 first, by other discoveries which form their 

 prelude; and. secondly, by the sharpening 

 of the inquiring intellect. Thus Ptolemy 

 grew out of Hipparchus, Copernicus out of 

 both, Kepler out of all three, and Newton 

 out of all the four. Newton did not rise 

 suddenly from the sea-level of the intellect 

 to his amazing elevation. At the time that 

 he appeared, the table-land of knowledge 

 was already high. He juts, it is true, above 

 the table-land, as a massive peak; still he 

 is supported by it, and a great part of his 

 absolute height is the height of humanity in 

 his time. It is thus with the discoveries of 

 Kirchhoff. Much had been previously ac- 

 complished; this he mastered, and then by 

 the force of individual genius went beyond 

 it. He replaced uncertainty by certainty, 

 vagueness by definiteness, confusion by or- 



