Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 87.djvu/261

Rh sure a conclusion as that the anti-toxin for infantile paralysis will be used when once it is discovered.

One of the surest indications of what this means for the laboring man is the steady increase of estimate of the salary necessary for efficient living. John Mitchell fixed it at $600 for cities of less than one hundred thousand population; Streightoff said $650; the New York State Conference of Charities and Corrections say $825 for a family of five, and the Bruères say $1,200 per annum is the minimum upon which a family of five can maintain an adequate degree of industrial efficiency. The fact that we have come to the place where such standards can be set is an augury of the future of our working people. Involuntary poverty is as sure of elimination as anything in human affairs can be. Time, struggle, courage, patience, individual sacrifice, intelligent handling of the growing surplus, will bring us the new day of economic freedom. With that will be established the real basis of a democratic society, a society in which there will be the possibility of individual distinction coincident with the improvement of the whole state, the two guaranteed by a government in which the sovereign is the whole population.

The period which has seen this reversal of economic conditions is likewise the century of greatest scientific advance. By 1800 Newton had established the law of gravitation; Harvey had discovered the circulation of the blood Linnaeus had developed a biological classification and nomenclature, Buffon had written fifteen volumes of natural history, feeling his way toward a theory of organic evolution, Cavendish had discovered hydrogen, and Priestley, oxygen, while Lavoisier had constructed a chemical nomenclature and discovered the composition of water; surgery had been practised by Hunter and Haller, and physiology and anatomy were subjects of study; Locke, Berkeley, Condillac had originated the doctrine of sensationalism in psychology, and Kant had completed Hume's theory of ideas by denying the possibility of knowing anything beyond the phenomenal world.

Released from the domination of false theology and bad metaphysics, the youthful sciences took mighty steps in the early years of the nineteenth century. Cuvier and Lamarck in biology, Young, La Place, Volta, and Carnot in physics, Dalton in chemistry, were followed a little later by Davy, Faraday, Arago, Ampère, Owen, and a vast army of lesser men. By the middle of the century the pendulum had swung heavily in the direction of biological ideas. Lyell announced the theory of the slow development of the structure of the earth's crust. Johannes Mueller had established the physico-chemical school of physiology, Agassiz had collected many of the facts pointing to the theory of evolution, and in 1859 Darwin published the "Origin of Species." Pasteur discovered the organism known as yeast and the relation of germs to putrefaction.