Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/773

Rh implications of which I speak were not perceived until long afterward, and had these been seen by Newton or by his contemporaries, and had they been pointed out, the probabilities are that Newton himself would have joined the great band of martyrs for truth that had preceded him. It is now seen that the whole doctrine of what we call the conservation of energy is involved and implied in his laws of motion. If that had been seen in Newton's day it would have been interpreted as an attempt by Newton to dethrone the Almighty by a mathematical process, as such work has been so often stigmatized within the last hundred years. Happily, we live in the post-martyr age, and we have no fears for our lives. But while the laws of mechanism had been accepted and taught for a hundred and fifty years, they were taught mostly as abstract propositions or as applicable to appreciable motions of inanimate matter, not at all as applicable to such a problem as the formation of the earth and of the solar system. So, when Laplace developed the nebular theory on the basis of Newton's laws, the attempt was denounced as impious and tending to overthrow all religious teachings; but the multiplication table holds good, no matter who denounces it or for what purpose; and now, after the lapse of three quarters of a century, men have become able to contemplate the nebular theory without danger of vertigo, and the proposition that the solar system has been evolved from a nebulous mass through the operations of simple mechanical laws is held by all astronomers and others capable of rational effort. When it was perceived that energy existed in several forms, and that these were transformable into each other and stood in quantitative relations to each other, another mechanical step was taken, for the chemistry and geology of the earth were brought under physical laws and relationships, but it was still held that all this could be granted as applicable to inorganic matter, without trenching at all upon the idea that life, and especially mankind, held divine prerogatives, and were not to be included as a part of the general scheme of the development of the earth. The educational institutions were hostile to these various advances, and decided that if true they were premature and not proved, even long after they were accepted by those competent to judge; but, so long as life and humanity were not involved in the problem, they did not need to feel much concern. And wherever, in any college or university in the land, the above advances in physical science were taught or mentioned, it was always with the carefully added statement that it was all outside of humanity, its interests, its hopes, or its fears, and that the statements made by other persons who taught differently in scientific matters were untrue, and were instigated by hatred to Christian beliefs and the institutions founded and maintained by