Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/520

504 facts or unassorted laws; they waited the advent of their unknown Newtons to fall into systematic and organic order.

In the pride of our hearts, we forget for the most part how very young science still is. We—who have seen that infant Hercules strangling serpents almost from its very cradle; we, who have beheld it grow rapidly under our own eyes to virile maturity and adult robustness of thew and muscle—we forget how new a power it is in the world, and how feeble and timid was its tender babyhood in the first few decades of the present century. Among the concrete sciences, astronomy, the eldest-born, had advanced furthest when our age was still young. It had reached the stage of wide general laws and evolutionary aspirations. But geology had only just begun to emerge from the earliest plane of puerile hypothesis into the period of collection and colligation of facts. Biology, hardly yet known by any better or truer name than natural history, consisted mainly of a jumble of half-classified details. Psychology still wandered disconsolate in the misty domain of the abstract metaphysician. The sciences of man, of language, of societies, of religion, had not even begun to exist. The antiquity of our race, the natural genesis of arts and knowledge, the origin of articulate speech, or of religious ideas, were scarcely so much as debatable questions. Among sciences of the abstract-concrete class, physics, unilluminated by the clear light of the principles of correlation and conservation of energy, embraced a wide and ill-digested mass of separate and wholly unconnected departments. Light had little enough to do with heat, and nothing at all to do in any way with electricity, or sound, or motion, or magnetism. Chemistry still remained very much in the condition of Mrs. Jellaby's cupboard. Everywhere science was tentative and invertebrate, feeling its way on earth with hesitating steps, trying its wings in air with tremulous fear, in preparation for the broader excursions and wider flights of the last three adventurous decades.

The great campaign of the unity and uniformity of Nature was the first to be fought, and in that campaign the earliest decisive battle was waged over the bloody field of geology. In 1837—to accept a purely arbitrary date for the beginning of our epoch—Lyell had already published his sober and sensible "Principles," and the old doctrine of recurrent catastrophes and periodical cataclysms was tottering to its fall in both hemispheres. Wholesale destructions of faunas and floras, wholesale creations of new life-systems, were felt to be out of keeping with a humane age. Drastic cosmogonies were going out of fashion. But even the uniformitarianism for which Lyell bravely fought and conquered, was, in itself, but a scrappy and piecemeal conception side by side with the wider and far more general views which fifty years have slowly brought to us. One has only, to open the "Text-Book of Geology," by Lyell's far abler modern disciple, Archibald Geikie, in order to see the vast advance made in our ideas as to the world's