Page:The Harveian oration for 1874.djvu/70

 But further, such objections as there are, attach not to the facts observed, but to the inferences, the generalisations drawn from imperfect knowledge. None of us who can remember the first broaching of Schwann’s famous theory of cell-formation, but must have been struck by the modifications which thirty years have introduced into the doctrines then propounded. We may take a fact for true as far as our means of observation reach, but it must be with the consciousness that with the increase of those means the truth may seem far other than it did before, as when more powerful telescopes resolved the nebulæ into myriads of stars. Nor only so, but there is many a fact of which we can see a part only, cannot take in the whole of it at once; and hence our notions concerning it must needs be incorrect. Let one person describe the Matterhorn as seen from the Italian side, and another as he viewed it from the Riffel, and it would be hard to recognise in the two accounts the same wonderful mountain. The description, too, would differ, according as the object were looked at when the dense storm-clouds were settling down upon it, or when the rosy vapours of the setting sun were beautifying, though half