Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/190

  of evolution, both in its relation to man and the totality of nature, he has brought near to him many of the outlying provinces of human knowledge, and poured upon them. a flood of light.

To the investigation of principles has succeeded the application of useful inventions. Theories have almost invariably germinated into practical science. From the study of mathematics, physics, chemistry, and geology, industries have been developed which have made the commonest dwelling of modern times a palace and the poorest cities a miracle of magnificence, compared with those of the past.

And all of this material advancement has been attended by a corresponding diffusion of knowledge and awakening of intellectual activity, so that the merest tyro in knowledge, at the present day, surpasses in intellectual acquisitions all that the most successful scholar of Greece and Rome could boast of, even though he had mastered all the learning of antiquity. More marvelous still, the latest expression of psychological science forces upon us the conviction that the mental faculties themselves, in harmony with the results of evolution everywhere else, are brought within its grasp, that they are thus enlarged in their capacity, and made equal to the task of furnishing through the revolving ages disclosures of the almost limitless secrets of the material world, and of the agency which brought it into being.

Here then, finally, we may look for the only avenue of escape from the doom with which literature was threatened—a doom not unlike that which settled over the Empire of Dullness as painted by the poet. In that picture the whole assembled concourse of wits and critics are represented as falling into a profound slumber, while listening to the sleepy literary performances of one or two of their heroes. Nor did they ever rise out of this lethargy. Fortunately, the comparison ends here. For while, without doubt, the same leaden slumber was fast settling over the prostrate form of modern Literature, the mighty enchantress, modern Science, touched it at the propitious moment with her potent rod, and woke into new life its exhausted and dying energies.



AVING recently come in possession of a family of these interesting little animals, I have found both pleasure and instruction in studying their habits. Others of the lizard tribe are not averse to, and many seem to prefer, the vicinity of men, while the chameleon always seeks the deep jungle, away from observation.

A woman from the jungle who happened to discover their haunts