32 IOWA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 



variableness or shadow of turning; an eternal becomings 

 an evolving order which comprehends the growth and 

 decay alike of solar systems and of the humblest of living 

 creatures. It is of this new world that the two master 

 Victorian poets, inspired by both the scientific and the 

 religious spirit, have written: 



All's law, but all's love. 



And, 



One God, one law, one element. 



And one far off divine event 



To which the whole creation moves. 



The effect of these new cosmic conceptions of science 

 penetrates every department of learning and every field of 

 life. It revolutionizes society, it rationalizes the social 

 mind. It has swept to the limbo of things that are not 

 the sprites of evil which affrighted our forefathers. In 

 this science has done a work which neither literature, nor 

 art, nor religion, nor ethical culture has proved itself able 

 to accomplish. It was the pious Melancthon, the gentle 

 scholar of the Reformation, who at Heidelberg saw in the 

 falling stars only the paths of deceitful devils, and the 

 mandarin to-day, learned in all the ethical wisdom of Con- 

 fucius, a classical scholar of the fine.st literary taste, still 

 bursts his firecrackers at the funeral of a friend that he 

 may frighten away the pestiferous spirits of evil which dog 

 the steps of men through life even to the threshold of the 

 world beyond. 



The rationalizing influence ot science upon civilization 

 needs no illustration to one versed in the literatures of the 

 prescientific ages, to one who has read Plato's Tingeus or 

 Plutarch's description of the moon. And how preposter- 

 ous were the theories current but a century since, such as 

 those which saw in fossils the freak of some plastic power 

 in nature or the remains of a catastrophe which swept 

 away in a flood of waters the very foundations of the 

 earth. To-day how rare and how interesting are such sur- 

 vivals of this almost forgotten time as the Atlantis of 

 Ignatius Donnelly! 



