A Century of Science 35 



would have been scouted as idle vagaries. It is 

 the introduction of such methods of study that is 

 making history scientific. It is enabling us to di- 

 gest the huge masses of facts that are daily poured 

 in upon us by decipherers of the past, monu- 

 ments, inscriptions, pottery, weapons, ethnological 

 reports, and all that sort of thing, and to make 

 all contribute toward a coherent theory of the 

 career of mankind upon the earth. 



In the course of the foregoing survey one fact 

 stands out with especial prominence : it appears 

 that about half a century ago the foremost minds 

 of the world, with whatever group of phenomena 

 they were occupied, had fallen, and were more and 

 more falling, into a habit of regarding things, not 

 as having originated in the shape in which we now 

 find thetn, but as having been slowly metamor- 

 phosed from some other shape through the agency 

 of forces similar in nature to forces now at work. 

 Whether planets, or mountains, or mollusks, or 

 subjunctive moods, or tribal confederacies were the 

 things studied, the scholars who studied them most 

 deeply and most fruitfully were those who studied 

 them as phases in a process of development. The 

 work of such scholars has formed the strong cur- 

 rent of thought in our time, while the work of 

 those who did not catch these new methods has 



