32 
IOWA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 
variableness or shadow of turning; an eternal becoming,, 
an evolving order which comprehends the growth and 
decay alike of solar systems and of the humblest of living 
creatures. It is of this new world that the two master 
Victorian poets, inspired by both the scientific and the 
religious spirit, have written: 
All’s law, but all’s love. 
And, 
One God, one law, one element, 
And one far off divine event 
To which the whole creation moves. 
The effect of these new cosmic conceptions of science 
penetrates every department of learning and every field of 
life. It revolutionizes society, it rationalizes the social 
mind. It has swept to the limbo of things that are not 
the sprites of evil which affrighted our forefathers. In 
this science has done a work which neither literature, nor 
art, nor religion, nor ethical culture has proved itself able 
to accomplish. It was the pious Melancthon, the gentle 
scholar of the Reformation, who at Heidelberg saw in the. 
falling stars only the paths of deceitful devils, and the 
mandarin to-day, learned in all the ethical wisdom of Con- 
fucius, a classical scholar of the finest literary taste, still 
bursts his firecrackers at the funeral of a friend that he 
may frighten away the pestiferous spirits of evil which dog 
the steps of men through life even to the threshold of the 
world beyond. 
The rationalizing influence of science upon civilization 
needs no illustration to one versed in the literatures of the 
prescientific ages, to one who has read Plato’s Tinrnus or 
Plutarch’s description of the moon. And how preposter- 
ous were the theories current but a century since, such as 
those which saw in fossils the freak of some plastic power 
in nature or the remains of a catastrophe which swept 
away in a flood of waters the very foundations of the 
earth. To-day how rare and how interesting are such sur- 
vivals of this almost forgotten time as the Atlantis of 
Ignatius Donnelly! 
