Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/189

Rh Owing to the endless tautologies of literature, it requires little discernment to see that it must be approaching a crisis in, if not a completion of, its destiny. Traveling in the same old circle, and treating us perpetually to the same round of entertainment without change or variety, it must gradually cease to interest, and eventually die a natural death. With no new oil to fill its lamps, steeped in a kind of Stygian darkness of its own creation, one may well exclaim with Othello:

And that this would have been a natural result if modern science had not come to the rescue at the right moment, and furnished its proper share of this "Promethean heat," admits of scarcely a doubt, especially in view of the fact that the most successful cultivators of letters in modern times are found resorting, for their choicest inspiration, to the new fountains thus opened to use. Notably among poets such men as Tennyson, among historians such men as Buckle, and among critics such men as Taine, have availed themselves of these helps to their genius; while by differentiating the condition of man, in some of the most important particulars, science has so wrought upon his character and destiny as to render it possible for such splendid intellects as Goethe, Dickens, and Victor Hugo to say something original of him. For, if you strip their pages of what may be called their scientific coloring, if you take away what directly or indirectly may be traced to the magic web which science has woven all through the affairs of modern life, you strip them of much of their witchery and of most of their originality.

Now, without going into particulars, we may say generally that the way in which science has wrought this great reform and revolution in literature has been by widening our survey of both man and nature. From a being of comparative insignificance, ruled by the rod of a tyrant, or made the sport of demons, and whose views of things were bounded by the narrowest horizon, she has transformed man into a being of the highest order of which we have any knowledge, having risen to it by the operation of laws that have been shaping his destiny for ages. Step by step his powers have been unfolding and the range of his vision enlarging, until he has been able to find some clew to his origin, and some interpretation of natural laws that before were a mystery to him. By the aid of what may be considered a sort of "second sight," namely, instruments of his own invention, he has been enabled to explore the remotest bounds of creation, and thus literally open to himself a new heaven and a new earth. With the telescope he has reached the most distant of planets, with the spectroscope he has discovered many of their constituent elements, and with the microscope he has penetrated into the secrets of the minutest forms of insect life. Through molecular physics and the grand modern