310 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XIV. No. 348. 



to the revelations of geometry and as- 

 tronomy. How inadequate such revela- 

 tions proved to be at that time is one of the 

 most startling disclosures in all history. 

 The ' Divine School of Alexandria ' passed 

 into oblivion. The myth of a flat and 

 four-cornered earth was crystallized into a 

 dogma strong enough to bear the burden 

 of men's souls by Cosmas Indicopleustes in 

 the sixth century ; it was supported with 

 still more invincible arguments by Martin 

 Luther in the sixteenth century ; and it 

 was revived and maintained with not less 

 truly admirable logic, as such, by John 

 Hampden and John Jasper in the last dec- 

 ades of the nineteenth century. To cite 

 examples from contemporary history show- 

 ing how difficult it is for the human mind 

 to get above its primitive conceptions, one 

 needs only to refer to the daily press. 

 During the past two months, in fact, the 

 newspapers have related how multitudes 

 of men, women and children, many of them 

 suffering from loathsome if not contagious 

 diseases, have visited a veritable middle-age 

 shrine in the city of New York, strong in the 

 hoary superstition that kissing an alleged 

 relic of St. Anne would remove their afflic- 

 tions. During the same interval a railway 

 circular has been distributed explaining 

 how tourists may witness the Moki snake- 

 dance, that weird ceremony by which the 

 Pueblo Indian seeks to secure rain in his 

 desert ; and a similar public, and oSicially 

 approved, ceremony has been observed in 

 the heat-stricken State of Missouri. 



Such epochs and episodes of regression 

 as these must be taken into account in 

 making up an estimate of scientific prog- 

 ress. They show us that the slow move- 

 ment upward in the evolution of man 

 which gives an algebraic sum of a few 

 steps forward per century is not incon- 

 sistent with many steps backward. Or, to 

 state the case in another way, the rate of 

 scientific advance is to be measured not so 



much by the positions gained and held by 

 individuals, as by the positions attained 

 and realized by the masses, of our race. 

 The average position of civilized man now 

 is probably below the mean of the positions 

 attained by the naturalist Huxley and the 

 statesman Gladstone, or below the mean of 

 the positions attained by the physicist von 

 Helmholtz and His Holiness the Pope. 

 When measured in this manner, the rate of 

 progress in the past twenty centuries is not 

 altogether flattering or encouraging to us, 

 especially in view of the possibility that 

 some of the more recently developed sci- 

 ences may suffer relapses similar to those 

 which so long eclipsed geography and as- 

 tronomy. 



It must be confessed, therefdre, when we 

 look backward over the events of the past 

 two thousand years, and when we consider 

 the scientific contents of the mind of the 

 average denizen of this planet, that it is 

 not wholly rational to entertain millennial 

 anticipations of progress in the immediate 

 future. The fact that some of the prime 

 discoveries of science have so recently ap- 

 peared to many earnest thinkers to threaten 

 the very foundations of society is one which 

 should not be overlooked in these confident 

 times of prosperity. And the equally im- 

 portant fact that entire innocence with re- 

 spect to the elements of science and dense 

 ignorance with respect to its methods, have 

 not been hitherto incompatible with justly 

 esteemed eminence in the divine, the states- 

 man, the jurist and the man of letters, is 

 one which should be reckoned with in mak- 

 ing up any forecast. It may be seriously 

 doubted, indeed, whether the progress of 

 the individual is not essentially limited 

 by the progress of the race. 



But this obverse and darker side of the 

 picture which confronts us from the past 

 has its reverse and brighter side ; and lam 

 constrained to believe that the present sta- 

 tus of science and the general enlightenment 



