SCIENCE AT THE BEGINNING OF THE CENTURY 



immediate acceptance. Bitter attacks were made upon 

 the " heresies," and that was meant to be a soberly tem- 

 pered judgment which in 1800 pronounced Hutton's 

 theories " not only hostile to sacred history, but equally 

 hostile to the principles of probability, to the results of 

 the ablest observations on the mineral kingdom, and to 

 the dictates of rational philosophy." And all this be- 

 cause Hutton's theory presupposed the earth to have 

 been in existence more than six thousand years. 



Thus it appears that though the thoughts of men had 

 widened, in these closing days of the eighteenth cen- 

 tury, to include the stars, they had not as yet expanded 

 to receive the most patent records that are written 

 everywhere on the surface of the earth. Before Hut- 

 ton's views could be accepted, his pivotal conception 

 that time is long must be established by convincing 

 proofs. The evidence was being gathered by William 

 Smith, Cuvier, and other devotees of the budding science 

 of paleontology in the last days of the century, but the 

 record of their completed labors belongs to another 

 epoch. 



IV 



The eighteenth - century philosopher made great 

 strides in his studies of the physical properties of mat- 

 ter, and the application of these properties in mechan- 

 ics, as the steam-engine, the balloon, the optic telegraph, 

 the spinning-jenny, the cotton-gin, the chronometer, the 

 perfected compass, the Leyden jar, the lightning-rod, 

 and a host of minor inventions testify. In a speculative 

 way he had thought out more or less tenable concep- 

 tions as to the ultimate nature of matter, as witness the 

 theories of Leibnitz and Boscovich and Davy, to which 



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