56 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XII. No. 289. 



tarded by the observation and record of 

 isolated facts, — advanced when observation 

 has been followed by further study and the 

 knitting to it of other pertinent observa- 

 tions or when it has proposed a new line of 

 study awaiting a mind great enough to 

 grasp it, but retarded when straws have 

 merely been added to the burden carried by 

 the world of learning. 



The botany of antiquity and of the Middle 

 Ages was chiefly a disjointed discussion of 

 plants, largely with reference to their uses, 

 and not a little mixed with mythology and 

 the fables of travelers, whose talents in our 

 time would have proved invaluable to the 

 daily press. Without disparagement to the 

 great men who went before him, Linnaeus 

 may be said to have been the first naturalist 

 whose mind grasped numberless details 

 with sufiScient precision to really systematize 

 them, just as in our own century Darwin 

 stands far out from his fellows in the same 

 respect, the power to handle and co-ordinate 

 isolated facts which all his work shows 

 being particularly evident in the treatment 

 of the great mass of heterogeneous matter 

 on which were based his generalizations as 

 to the variations of animals and plants 

 under domestication. 



Ours has been a century of accumulation 

 and of utilization. It would be unjust to 

 ourselves and our immediate predecessors 

 to say that great laws have not been reas- 

 oned out from observed facts in larger meas. 

 ure even than ever before, notwithstanding 

 the advanced point at which science stood 

 when the centui-y opened. It would be also 

 in obvious conflict with the truth to say 

 that the world of manufactures and of com- 

 merce has not been most apt to seize upon 

 and employ the more salient discoveries of 

 science, often in a manner not dreamed of 

 by the discoverers ; but it may still be said 

 that the century just closing, great as have 

 been its advances, has been a century of 

 accumulation bej'ond assimilation, a period 



of roughing out and of laying away lumber 

 far in excess of its employment as joists 

 and sills and boards in the great structure 

 of human progress. 



If the evidence of the times may be 

 trusted, the next century is to be marked 

 by a still greater productive activity. Spe- 

 cialization and the attendant division of 

 labor can have no result more logical than 

 this. Though it may suit our convenience 

 to speak of centuries, we know the pure 

 artificiality of such divisions of time, and 

 although still in the nineteenth century, 

 we may with all propriety count ourselves 

 of the twentieth and project the activities 

 and tendencies of to-day into the morrow ; 

 but the same drift of the straws which 

 points to a still greater accumulation of mi- 

 nutiae during the century we are so soon to 

 enter on shows with equal probability that 

 its passage is to be marked by a co-ordina- 

 tion of isolated observations and discoveries 

 far greater than the world has ever before 

 witnessed. 



To this very desirable end we of the 

 present day may contribute to no small 

 degree. Our discoveries, as has been said 

 already, are at once the handicap and the 

 foundation stones of the men who are to 

 take our places. The manner in which we 

 leave the records of what we have done 

 decides in large part the preponderance of 

 its utility over its obstructiveness, and in 

 many cases may even determine whether it 

 might not better have been left undone. 

 It is easy to justify ourselves to a certain 

 extent when we do not do the right thing, 

 by pleading that we did not know what 

 the right thing was, because we interested 

 ourselves only in a limited part of what 

 ought to have been handled as a whole, 

 and that posterity ought to be grateful for 

 the substance of our contributions without 

 being too critical as to their form and acces- 

 sibility ; but we are not likely to go far 

 wrong if we assume that few of us who 



