XLIV.] REMARKS ON THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE. 225 



compare and classify plants and animals of various kinds. 

 Thns organic morphology, including anatomy and syste- Morpho- 

 matic natural history, attained to some considerable degree °^' 

 of progress at a comparatively early period in the history 

 of science, because the more elementary of its fundamental 

 conceptions present no difficulty, and the facts wliich 

 constitute its data are open to observation. 



The fact that mathematics was earlier developed than 

 any physical science, is, when properly considered, a very 

 interesting and significant fact. Science began with mathe- Science 

 matics. It might have been expected that its beginnins ]'^^'^^ ?\ 



° '- == o the point 



would be at some point nearer to human life and duty — most 

 that it would have begun at biology, or psychology, or f^^^'' 

 politics, and not at mathematics, which of all possible l^uman 

 studies is the remotest from human life. Socrates regarded wal' cTn 

 it as a useless waste of time and thouo'ht to studv external s^quently 



ciGemsd. 



nature, while he knew so little about the nature of man ; useless : 



and Galileo's contemporaries might have plausibly said, 



" Why do you gaze on the stars, which are far off, while 



you know so little of the flowers which are under your 



feet ? " Such objections were, so far as I can see, quite 



unanswerable in the infancy of science ; they could not 



be refuted, and they were overcome only by the refusal of 



the scientific instinct to listen to them. But now we have 



learned more of the external world than we shall probably 



ever know of man, and we have learned more of the 



motions of the stars than we shall probably ever know of 



the growth of the flowers. Science, at its origin, was too 



remote from human life to be obviously useful, and would 



never have made any progress whatever if it had waited 



to justify its existence by its usefulness : its first progress and still 



was due to its own intrinsic intellectual interest. ^ And ^*^ moving 



,1 . .-. .11 ,1 power IS 



the same is stiil practically true, although the usefulness not useM- 



1 Chemistry is a partial exception : the search after the process for 

 making gold appears to have done something for its progress. But the 

 effect of this was probably very slight ; and the gi'eat discoveries of 

 Lavoisier and his contemporaries, which really founded the science of 

 chemistry, were made without any such stimulus. 

 VOL. II. Q 



