204 SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT. 



made quite as much progress as the purely abstract 

 sciences. In a manner, though perhaps hardly as 

 powerful in their influence on practical pursuits, they 

 are more popular ; they occupy a larger number of stu- 

 dents ; and inasmuch as they also comprise the study of 

 man himself, they have a very profound influence on 

 our latent opinions, interests, and beliefs — i.e., on our 

 inner life. It is the object of this and some of the 

 following chapters to trace concisely the altered ways 

 and means by which, in the course of the last hundred 

 years, the study of the actual things and events of nature 

 has been prosecuted. For those who wrote the history 

 of the descriptive sciences in the middle of our century, 

 the arrangement of this vast subject presented little 

 difficulty. It had been in the main accomplished by 

 the great naturalists who, during the seventeenth and 

 eighteenth centuries, laboured to bring the large and 

 ever increasing number of natural objects into some 

 supposed system and some professed order, to enumer- 

 ate them in catalogues or marshal them in museums. 

 The familiar division of natural things into animals, 

 vegetables, and minerals had received a general sanction. 

 Separate sciences, with separate chairs at the univer- 

 sities, which still survive, attended to the separate 

 treatment of these subjects. One of the greatest 

 changes which the present age has witnessed has been 

 5. the breaking down of the old landmarks and of the 



The break- 



ing down of stereotyped divisions which existed in the beo-inning and 



old land- "^ ^ o o 



°^'^^- all throug;li the first half of the centurv.-^ 



^ This change has also very much 

 lessened the interest with which 

 we now regard the solution of a 



times, was much discussed— the 

 classification of the sciences. It 

 will be seen that of the many prin- 



problem which, down to recent ciples of division which have been 



