82 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 
gree imitative; and the fundamentals of them were such that, once established, 
they became enduring. As the purposes they served were equally applicable in 
all places and times, by migration they spread over the earth and by transmission 
passed down from father to son. And to-day we make use of artificial standards, 
of artificial letters, of words long coined, of much imitative knowledge, nor ever 
spend more time upon them than is necessary to fix their names and meaning in 
our minds. 
But now let us turn to the second kind of knowledge—the experimental— 
and trace its origin and growth among the human race. 
Just as the experimental knowledge of the child arises mostly from contact 
with Nature, so the experimental knowledge of the race must be, for the most 
part, a knowledge arising from contact with Nature. Now, though the fundamental 
ideas in the natural world are few and everywhere the same, yet in the execution 
of these few ideas there is such endless variety that the natural conclusion in regard 
to them would be, especially to a casual observer, ‘‘ There is no law in Nature—all 
is confusion and chance.” ‘The people of one region, migrating to another more 
or less remote, would find an almost entirely different phase in Nature and the 
phenomena it exhibited—especially of plant and animal life, which lends so much 
to the formation of variety in nature as presented to us in various places. Varie- 
ties of climate, differences of heat and cold, of rain and wind and length of day 
and night—all these and many other things would lend very little encouragement 
to the student of Nature. Had an observer lived long enough in one place to 
know well by experience the general features of that locality, yet removal to an- 
other might present such contradictions as to shake his confidence in his former 
observations. All such experience rendered the knowledge of nature a thing of 
slow growth. Before it could be found that under all the variety of external 
nature ran an undercurrent of unvarying sameness and that all phenomena oc- 
curred in obedience to inexorable law, it was necessary that ages should pass 
away, that the human race should inhabit the whole world, that easy means of 
communication should be invented, that civilization should spread abroad its 
benign influences, that peace should link in friendly communion the nations of 
earth, that life should grow less imburdened with the struggle for existence and 
have more of leisure, and lastly, that multitudes of observers in all quarters of the 
globe must carefully and faithfully record their observations from year to year 
through many generations. But none cf these conditions existed during the early 
ages of the human family. And therefore the sciences of nature were of very 
slow growth. Because very much of the heavens above us is always visible at 
night, and because the stars are always beautiful and attract attention, it was very 
natural that the science of astronomy should take some form at a very early date. 
Except astronomy, however, none of the natural sciences assumed any valuable 
form until within the most recent times. The last three centuries have witnessed 
the birth and growth of nearly all that we call natural sciences. Even our own 
lives are contemporary with constant advances, conquests and developments in. 
