May 15, 1903.] 



SCIENCE. 



773 



Boulton, Arkwright and Hargreaves, were 

 completed and something like the modern 

 factory system was begun. From indus- 

 trial history we gather that 'England in- 

 creased her wealth tenfold and gained a 

 hundred years ' start in front of the nations 

 of Europe.' 



While vigorous protests, some even vio- 

 lent, as the riots at Lyons and the destruc- 

 tion of Hargreaves ' home in England, were 

 made against this rampant spirit of indus- 

 trialism, there was witnessed a literary 

 renaissance in Great Britain second only 

 to 'the spacious times of great Elizabeth.' 

 That age nourished Keats, Shelley, Byron, 

 Scott, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Burns and 

 Burke. C. Alphonso Smith in his exquisite 

 essay on 'Literature and Industrialism' 

 says: ' In a love of nature that made all 

 seasons seem as spring, in devotion to 

 democratic ideals, in variety of range and 

 intensity of feeling, this period takes pre- 

 cedence of Elizabeth's reign.' It was of 

 this age that Wordsworth said : 



" Joy it was in that dawn to be alive, 

 But to be young was very heaven." 



Granting Tolstoi's definition of science 

 as a 'mere gratification of human curiosity, ' 

 we realize that 'science is history making,' 

 for it was in this period that Volta and 

 Galvani (1801) gave us a source of power 

 and a means of applying it. At the close 

 of the time Dalton had announced the 

 atomic theory and Davy had obtained the 

 alkali and alkaline earth metals. 



In the second period, about 1840, there 

 accumulated the potentialities that shaped 

 what is termed the Victorian Era. Quot- 

 ing Smith again, ' ' In those years railroads 

 first began to intersect the land, telegraph 

 lines were first stretched and the ocean was 

 crossed for the first time by steam-pro- 

 pelled vessels. All these mechanical tri- 

 umphs tended to annihilate time and space. 

 The products of manufacture could now 



be sent with dispatch to the most distant 

 quarters. Nations came closer together. 

 The two hemispheres became, and have con- 

 tinued, one vast arena of industrial and 

 scientific interchange. * * * " 



The literary record of this period con- 

 tains the names of Tennyson, Goethe and 

 the Brownings as poets; Dickens, Thack- 

 eray and George Eliot in fiction; Ruskin 

 and Carlyle in miscellaneous literature. 

 In America, during this Mexican War 

 period, we had Longfellov^, Lowell, Whit- 

 tier, Hawthorne, Emerson and Holmes, 

 'the six names that have given the New 

 England states their incontestable suprem- 

 acy in American literature.' 



The part played by the south in litera- 

 ture during these periods was not prom- 

 inent. The preeminence of that part of 

 our country in forensic art and oratory 

 need not be considered, nor need we dis- 

 cuss the social conditions, and honest dif- 

 ference of opinion as to the proper inter- 

 pretation of the true relationship of the 

 government as a whole and the integral 

 states which constituted it, other than to 

 say that the south, conquered, as was neces- 

 sary, came out of the Civil War with new 

 economic ideas, with a renewed and 'ever- 

 increasing development of her natural re- 

 sources, with a more flexible industrial sys- 

 tem, a more rational attitude toward 

 labor, and more enlightened methods of 

 education and with it there came a literary 

 and scientific inspiration impossible be- 

 fore. ' In the year 1870, our third period, 

 which statisticians take as the birth year 

 of the new industrial movement in the 

 south, flashed out new literary stars such 

 as Sidney Lanier, Charles Egbert Crad- 

 dock and George W. Cable. That year can 

 not be named in the presence of scientific 

 men without our thoughts reverting at once 

 to the names of Mendeleeff and Meyer. 



The last period is but as yesterday, even 

 to-day. 



