30 A Century of /Science 



The practical uses of electricity are introducing 

 new features into the whole subject of molecular 

 physics, and in this region, I suspect, we are to 

 look for some of the most striking disclosures of 

 the immediate future. 



A word must be said of the historical sciences, 

 which have witnessed as great changes as any 

 others, mainly through the introduction of the com- 

 parative method of inquiry. The first two great 

 triumphs of the comparative method were achieved 

 contemporaneously in two fields of inquiry very 

 remote from one another : the one was the work 

 of Cuvier, above mentioned ; the other was the 

 founding of the comparative philology of the Ar- 

 yan languages by Franz Bopp, in 1816. The work 

 of Bopp exerted as powerful an influence through- 

 out all the historical fields of study as Cuvier ex- 

 erted in biology. The young men whose minds 

 were receiving their formative impulses between 

 1825 and 1840, under the various influences of 

 Cuvier and Saint-Hilaire, Lyell, Goethe, Bopp, 

 and other such great leaders, began themselves 

 to come to the foreground as leaders of thought 

 about 1860 : on the one hand, such men as Dar- 

 win, Gray, Huxley, and Wallace ; on the other 

 hand, such as Kuhn and Schleicher, Maine, Mau- 

 rer, Mommsen, Freeman, and Tylor. The point 



