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SCIENCE. 



[Vol. XVI. No. 404 



-we call iDhuman, into the coffers of the other we pour our 

 millions. It seems to me we err when we consider any 

 discovery of the truth whatsoever as the property of its 

 discoverer. It is true that he who labors with the mind 

 should receive a reward for his work, just as well as he who 

 labors with his hand. But even our patent system does not 

 acknowledge a man's property in his discovery: it merely 

 gives him a monopoly of it for a few years, and then it 

 comes into the possession of mankind, to whom it all the 

 time belonged. There may be much fallacy mixed up wdth 

 what truth there is in Edward Bellamy's "Looking Back- 

 ward;" but there is no doubt but that the greed for gain is 

 one of the darkest of the stains upon the escutcheon of our 

 boasted nineteenth-century civilization. 



Happily and naturally the great discoveries of the world 

 have not proceeded from this avaricious spirit. As a rule, 

 the aim has originally been solely to seek truth. It is only 

 when the discovery has been made, that the temptation has 

 proved too strong, and the worshipper has turned his back 

 on the pure shrine of truth, and bowed his knee to the shrine 

 of Mammon. 



Having thus sketched briefly what appears to me the true 

 aims of science, it is my purpose now to consider the rapid 

 growth of science in the past, and from this, as far as it may 

 be possible, to point out the as yet unconquered fields and 

 the hints of what we may expect of science in the future. 

 Down to the time of Aristotle, natural scierce can hardly be 

 said to have had any existence. Here we find its dawning, 

 when the method of deducing the law from the individual 

 phenomena was first proposed by that far-seeing philosopher. 

 It was, however, but the dawning, and the day was long in 

 breaking. All through the later civilissation of Rome, and 

 through the dark ages, the advance was at a snail's pace. 

 Alchemy recognized the true aim, — search for truth, — but to 

 attain this aim resorted to such deception, that her lack of 

 fidelity to the truth retarded the development of true science 

 many centuries. Eoger Bacon with prophetic vision foresaw 

 the day that was soon to break, even as his more illustrious 

 but infamous namesake of Verulam realized, as no other of 

 his time, what that day would bring. Kepler, Galileo, and 

 Newton caught the first glimpses of the rising sun, and from 

 their time to ours the progress has been with ever accelerated 

 velocity. 



Of the four great generalizations of natural science thus far 

 discovered, but one dates back of the present century, — that 

 of universal gravitation. The importance of this discovery 

 cannot be overestimated, inasmuch as this was the first time 

 an attempt had been made to include universal phenomena 

 under a single law. We, with our modern knowledge, are 

 apt to underestimate the effect of thus introducing the new 

 principle of universal generalization into science. True, 

 Newton did not explain the cause of gravitation, nor can we. 

 It remains for some future philosopher, some greater New- 

 ton, to show how matter can act on matter at a distance, if 

 it does; to show us whence came that runaway star crossing 

 the great starry disk of the universe at inconceivable speed, 

 what force set it going, and whither it tends; to tell us why 

 the tail of the comet is repelled by the sun, and not attracted, 

 as all material bodies should be; to explain to us the 

 relation existing between what we call matter and the so- 

 called luminiferous ether. It seems to us to-day as if gravi- 



tation were but a special instance of some greater, infinitely 

 farther-reaching law, by which cohesion and chemical affinity, 

 and a host of other phenomena to-day inexplicable, will all 

 be made clear. Such a generalization the science of the 

 future may hope to make. 



With the opening of this century, science began to make 

 rapid strides. The chemist of the last decades of the last 

 century began to suspect the indestructibility of matter, and 

 under Berzelius and Lavoisier quantitative analysis became 

 well established. It seems strange to us to-day that such an 

 idea as the aanihilation and creation of matter could have 

 ever been held : and yet when we think of the burning of a 

 piece of wood or coal, with only a bit of ashes left, the other 

 products of the combustion having vanished into thin air; 

 when we think of the solution of a piece of iron or zinc in 

 acid with the liquid apparently unchanged ; when we think 

 of the coating of copper formed on a knife-blade immer.sed 

 in a solution of blue vitriol; when we think of how our 

 fathers were taught that heat was a material substance which 

 mysteriously entered into or left other substances under cer- 

 tain conditions, — our wonder becomes less. It remained 

 for a Dalton to open this century with the second great gen- 

 eralization of science, the atomic theory of matter, which in 

 eludes within itself the idea of the permanence of matter. To 

 him all matter was made up of atoms, infinitesimal in size, 

 unchangeable, and few in species; but by the union of the 

 different kinds of atoms all the multiform substances which 

 we know arise. It is true that we find the idea of the atomic 

 constitution of matter more than hinted at in the old Greek 

 philosophers, and some have sought to show that Democritus 

 and Empedocles were the real originators of the theory. But 

 to these Greeks the atoms were but philosophic abstrac- 

 tions, perhaps we might better say clever guesses: to Dalton 

 they were experimental facts. The investigations of later 

 chemists have justified the views of Dalton, and yet have 

 shown their incompleteness. Mendeljeff and Newlands and 

 Victor Meyer have demonstrated the close dependence of the 

 properties of any element on the weight of its atoms, thus 

 enabling them to predict the properties of elements then 

 unknown, but whose subsequent discovery has verified their 

 predictions. Crookes has shown the probability that what 

 we call elements in many cases may not be true elements, 

 but mixtures of elements so closely similar that he calls 

 them "meta " elements. Many chemists have hazarded the 

 guess that all our elements are in reality not simple, but 

 compounds of some one as yet undiscovered, absolutely sim- 

 ple element; and it remains for the chemist of the future to 

 point out the true nature of the chemical atom. 



After the time of Dalton, chemistry received an impetus 

 greater than any it had heretofore received, by what we can 

 characterize as the discovery of organic chemistry by Wohler 

 in 1828. Up to this time the existence of so called vital force 

 had been almost universally believed in. Under the influence 

 of this force arose all the phenomena which we call life, and 

 which were thought to be wholly different from all other 

 phenomena, and beyond the study of man. Substances 

 which were formed by life it was supposed could be formed 

 in no other way, inasmuch as life force was a force which 

 must ever elude man's investigations. But qjite by accident 

 Wohler formed the first organic substance from one with 

 whose formation life had had nothing whatsoever to do. For 



