420 
has ever guided attention toward the near ; 
and it is but natural that the youngest of 
the sciences should yet retain vestiges of 
undue magnification of the abnormal. 
3. In general, scientific determination 
proceeds from the qualitative to the quanti- 
tative. The tendency is displayed by every 
branch of science, and so conspicuously 
that it may be deemed characteristic. It 
is in accordance with this tendency that 
estimate precedes weighing and recon- 
naissance goes before surveying ; and it is 
under the same tendency that scientific 
progress involves constantly-increasing re- 
finement in observation and ever-growing 
accuracy in definition. 
4. In general, scientific interpretation 
proceeds from the formal to the physical,* 
from the material or the inert or the static 
to the dynamic. The positions and move- 
ments of the moon and planets were de- 
termined with fair accuracy before Newton 
discovered that the paths of these and all 
other celestial bodies are fixed by gravity ; 
when this discovery afforded the means for 
determining position and movement with 
incomparably greater accuracy. The phys- 
ical and chemical effects of heat were recog- 
nized for generations, and were ascribed to 
the hypothetic element phlogiston or the 
imaginary fluid caloric long before Juole 
and others found it to be merely a manifes- 
tation of molecular motion; whereupon 
physics and chemistry were revolutionized 
and the forces of nature were gradually 
harnessed many times more effectively than 
before. 
The ancients recognized vitality and 
ascribed it usually to a material something 
joined to the matter of the body. Some 
twenty-four centuries ago sagacious Hera- 
clitus conceived life as a universal fire, and 
*As defined by Le Conte in a notable article ‘On 
the Structure and Origin of Mountains,’ American 
Journal of Science, third series, Vol. XVI., 1878, 
ge 107. 
SCIENCE. 
[N.S. Von. VI. No. 142. 
less than five centuries ago Paracelsus, and 
after him van Helmont, wrote of the anima 
mundi, or archeus, having in mind a 
vaguely imponderable thing akin to the 
so-called astral body which votaries of an 
oriental belief imagine themselves able to 
materialize out of the depths of transcen- 
dental revery ; two centuries ago Hoffmann 
and other anatomists spoke habitually of 
the vital fluid’as contemporary physicists of 
of phlogiston, and within a hundred years 
leading physiologists, like Hunter, thought 
and wrote of a‘ diffused vital material; ’ 
less than a quarter-century ago Barker was 
deemed bold unto recklessness for under- 
taking to correlate vital and physical 
forces,* and many heads were shaken 
doubtfully when, in his presidential ad- 
dress before the American Association at 
Boston in 1880, the same brilliant experi- 
mentalist argued from the applications of 
Mosso’s plethysmograph that mental force 
also may be weighed and measured, so that 
it must be regarded as inter-convertible 
with other forms of energy;; yet half a 
generation of organic chemistry and 
physics has established these revolutionary 
propositions beyond peradventure, and in- 
troduced a new era of biologic research. 
The tendency toward dynamic interpre- 
tation is well shown, too, in geology. In 
the infancy of the science, formations and 
the extinction of faunas were ascribed to 
extra-natural cataclysms, the opening of 
valleys aud the shaping of hills to ill-con- 
ceived or inconceivable catastrophes; with 
Lyell—a personal associate of scientific men 
now living—came the doctrine of uni- 
formism, under which it is recognized that 
existing rains and rivers and silt-distribu- 
ting waves are competent to produce the 
* The Correlation of Vital and Physical Forces,’ 
University Series, Number 2 ( Van Nostrand), 1875. 
+ Proceedings of the American Association for the 
Advancement of Science, Volume X:XIX., 1881, page 
12 et sequentia. 
