Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/500

484 declared that "some men would learn more in Hampstead stage than others in the tour of Europe"; or, to take an illustration: In a cathedral at Pisa swung a chandelier. Thousands had passed in and out in an unthinking, heedless manner before Galileo's day, but when the young Florentine philosopher looked toward that ceiling, that chandelier, as a type of the pendulum, took on a new oscillation, and its vibrations extended farther and farther, until they reached the very center of the earth, and again swung outward toward other worlds, to return, bringing tidings of the gravitation that holds sway on those celestial orbs. In like manner a humble stone-mason at Cromarty, Scotland, saw on the rock some peculiar forms. He examined them carefully, and deciphered from these hieroglyphics the record of the "Old Red Sandstone," and from that time onward the name of Hugh Miller has been known in almost ever hamlet of civilized earth. The life of that illustrious Frenchman, Baron Cuvier, furnishes another and excellent illustration of the same thing. In the plaster-quarries of Montmartre, just without the environs of Paris, were lying scattered here and there a lot of animal remains. Thousands and doubtless millions of people had passed that way, and seen in them only so many old bones. Not so when Cuvier looked. The time had come for the arcana to be opened, and like the dry bones in the prophet's vision they became alive again and began to speak; and, wherever geology is studied, there the voice is heard chanting pæans of praise to the immortal Frenchman. His was not the record of a man who waded through seas of slaughter to write his name

 Among the few, the immortal ones, That were not born to die."

Yet he has written it on an equally enduring tablet; he has writsen it on the history of geological progress, where it will endure per secula seculorum.

Science has also turned her attention to legal pursuits, and made her voice heard in courts of justice. Nearly every one doubtless is familiar with cases of men who have been arrested, charged with murder, and the blood found upon their garments examined. It is also probably known that there is some difference of opinion as to the degree of certainty with which human blood can be distinguished from that of an animal. This difference seems to be, in part at least, the result of the different methods pursued by the various investigators. Many persons suppose that the corpuscles are the only things to be examined. These are globular in shape and of about the same form for nearly all the mammalia. They, however, show a difference in size, and from this difference may be told approximately the animal from which they have been derived. There is another and equally valuable