54 THE JUST CLAIMS OF NATURAL SCIENCE. 



actness in other departments of human thought. Indeed 

 it may be safely asserted that this influence has been far 

 reaching and profound, modifying essentially the tone 

 of philosophic thought throughout the civilized world. 

 This point alone would be an ample subject for a treatise ; 

 but present limits permit but a passing allusion to it ; 

 though it is one of the most important benefits of science. 



Again, it may be confidents claimed that science is 

 yet pushing on with its full strength, in progressive 

 work. Its work is nowhere done ; its powers are not 

 approaching exhaustion ; the time is yet immeasurably 

 distant when, superannuated, it will be retired on half- 

 pay for what it has done but can do no longer. 



It might appear that science had already approached 

 the final limits of its discoveries, and had well nigh used 

 up the material for new inventions. It has forced steam 

 and combustibles nearly to their utmost, in jjroviding 

 motive power; it has wrested from magneto-electricity 

 the secrets which annihilate time, extend man's nerves 

 of instant sensation quite around the globe, and provide 

 him at night with a radiant flow of miniature sunlight. 

 There seems to be little left that it can call upon this 

 mysterious agent to do. It has followed the thinning- 

 current of life up to its primal driblets in protoplasmic 

 cells ; beyond that, it would seem that it never can pass. 

 Is it not in danger of gliding soon into a Sargasso sea of 

 idleness, doomed to perpetual stagnation \ 



Such apprehensions are groundless. Nature in her 

 vastness is not so easily probed. It would be more true to 

 say that science already perceives that it is on the very 

 verge of new discoveries of motive power, of electrical 

 conditions, laws and possibilities, of optical principles, 

 and, above all, of the relations of the forces of life to those 

 of chemistry and to dead matter. 



Science was never more truly throbbing in every fibre 

 with the energy of hopeful action than she is to-day. 



38 



