Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 22.djvu/34

24 through paleontology and geology to the fiery-liquid youth of our planet, and hence extends its hand in the nebular hypothesis to the theory of the persistence of energy, while anthropology, ethnology, and the history of the primitive ages lay the bridge to linguistics, the theory of knowledge, and the historical sciences. The examination of the vital processes, physiology, has stripped off the larva-casing of vitalism, and has burst from its cocoon as applied physics and chemistry. While the physiologists of Germany during the first half of the century, and those of England and France in part till to-day, were engaged only with morphology, and at most with experiments on animals, for a generation past all the intellectual and instrumental aids of the physicist, all the arts of the chemist, have been naturalized in the physiological laboratory, and have been thereby much augmented. Nothing better illustrates the lively interworking of the different branches of science, at the present time, than that the investigation into original generation has helped surgery to the greatest progress it has made since Ambroise Paré, and pathology to a conception of the nature of the most destructive infectious disease, pulmonary tuberculosis.

Sciences, also, whose circles once hardly intersected, have approached each other. The triumph of the inductive method rendered historians and philologists like Thomas Buckle and Max Müller anxious to make themselves masters of its advantages, for it was evident that the difference between their activity and that of the naturalist was not fundamentally very great: of course not, for induction is, in practice, only sound reason sagaciously applied. To the interworking of archaeological and scientific labors we owe a well-founded acquisition of recent times, the study of the primitive condition of mankind, created jointly by the Danish scholars Forchhammer, Steenstrup, Thomsen, and Worsaae, which is in many cases more interesting than real history.

It would be superfluous to extend the painting of this picture. We have given enough to show that the view that regards the science of the present as having been seduced into by-ways, and as being dissipated among special investigations definitely separated from each other, and that the notion that it is lacking in general ideas, that the wood can not be seen for the trees, are deceptive. It is, however, probable that no more such comprehensive theories as those of the persistence of energy and of descent will appear during the next decade, because a third theory of such moment is now hardly conceivable. We may therefore well repeat what Dove said, at about the middle of the last century, that "the impulse which science received in Newton's time, through the co-operation of his great talents, was not responded to by a proportionately rapid progress in the following period. Time was needed to elaborate the thoughts which had been so grandly aroused in the different fields, to adjust them in detail to the