May 19, 1905.] 



SCIENCE. 



771 



among rare gems, and only slowly approach 

 such commonplace things as plants and 

 animals and soils, to end at last with man. 

 How growing knowledge has pursued paths 

 leading from the remote to the near, from 

 the rare to the common, from the abnormal 

 to the normal, from the unreal to the real, 

 from wonder to wisdom — indeed, from 

 chaos to cosmos and from star to man— all 

 this is history; ivhy these paths have been 

 pursued may well remain a problem until 

 more is known of the constitution of the 

 human brain and of the laws of mind. 



Yet, viewed in the light of the relations 

 among the sciences, it is no mere chance 

 that the science of man rises from the hip 

 and shoulder and head of the elder-sister 

 sciences, as the family infant is borne by 

 primitive folk; for the sciences have come 

 up, just as the cosmos seems to have de- 

 veloped, in an order of increasing com- 

 plexity. The stellar bodies are interrelated 

 through gravity and various forms of molar 

 force which may be combined under the 

 term molarity; and astronomy in its earlier 

 form w'as the science of these relations. 

 As the planets took shape (whether through 

 nebular integration or through planetisimal 

 aggregation) chemical reactions became 

 paramount over mechanical relations, and 

 affinity was superadded to molarity ; and 

 in a parallel order chemistry was added to 

 astronomy in the growth of knowledge. 

 When our planet was encrusted and the 

 great deeps were divided into sea and land, 

 life appeared; and thereby vitality was 

 superadded to affinity, and, concordantly, 

 as knowledge grew, the biotic sciences fol- 

 lowed the more exactly quantitative earlier 

 branches. In cosmic time animal activity 

 followed hard on more inert vegetal life, 

 and motility was superadded to vitality; 

 and in human time animals were domes- 

 ticated soon after plants were cultivated, 

 while zoology grew up nearly apace with 

 phytology. As the earth aged into conti- 



nental and seasonal steadiness and the 

 struggle for organic existence grew strenu- 

 ous, more and more of the battles were lost 

 to the strong and the races to the swift, and 

 were won by the intelligent, and thereby 

 mentality was superadded to vitality as a 

 factor in earth history and man came to his 

 own as a mind-led monarch over lower life 

 and a progi^essive conqueror of the natural 

 forces ; and in like manner, as human his- 

 tory matures, it records anthropology as 

 the younger-kin of zoology. In a word, 

 man, as the head and intellectual ruler over 

 the realm of life, alone stands for all the 

 fundamental forces of molarity plus affin- 

 ity plus vitality plus motility plus men- 

 tality, and is interrelated alike with sun 

 and planet, agent and reagent, plant and 

 seed, egg and animal, and with groups of 

 his own kind; and in a word, the science 

 of man is, more than any other branch of 

 knowledge, interdependent with all the sis- 

 ter sciences and more many-sided than any 

 of the rest. 



THE SETTING OF THE SCIENCE. 



The scriptless nomads of the human 

 prime (and of many lands) set their 

 journeys by the stars and enshrined their 

 beastly deities in the visible firmament, 

 and thus astrology set out on a course still 

 traceable through constellations and planet- 

 myths ; at the same time these mnemonic 

 devices of the sky were mated with equally 

 imaginative symbols of every-day things, 

 and as these grew into geometric designs 

 and arbitrary characters, a system of alma- 

 cabala — the earth-placed twin of sky-set 

 astrology — took a course still marked by 

 the ancient hieroglyphs of many lands. In 

 the fulness of time (and primitive progress 

 was tedious beyond telling) astronomy 

 grew out of astrology as the first of the 

 sciences, leaving a large residuum of myth- 

 ology behind. In like manner, and at 

 about the same stage (?. e., about the birth- 



