A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 

 BOOK V 



ASPECTS OF RECENT SCIENCE 



OTUDENTS of the classics will recall that the old 

 O Roman historians were accustomed to detail the 

 events of the remote past in what they were pleased 

 to call annals, and to elaborate contemporary events 

 into so-called histories. Actuated perhaps by the 

 same motives, though with no conscious thought of 

 imitation, I have been led to conclude this history of 

 the development of natural science with a few chapters 

 somewhat different in scope and in manner from the 

 ones that have gone before. 



These chapters have to do largely with recent con- 

 ditions. Now and again, to be sure, they hark back 

 into the past, as when they tell of the origin of such in- 

 stitutions as the British Museum, the Royal Society, 

 and the Royal Institution; or when the visitor in 

 modern Jena imagines himself transplanted into the 

 Jena of the sixteenth century. But these reminiscent 



