THE LAST QUARTER CENTURY IN SCIENCE.
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THE LAST QUARTER CENTURY IN SCIENCE.
L. L. DYCHE, Scientific Department, AUBURN, KANSAS.
TOO much steeping in Roman fable, too much lullaby in Grecian dream, too much fetich worship in religion has at last produced a revolution in thought. The change wrought in the ideas of men during the last quarter century is without a parallel. "A conflict," in the language of President White, "has been waged, with battles fiercer, with sieges more persistent than in any of the petty warfares of Caesar or Napoleon." And in every case history confirms the statement that Science, the modern Goddess of Progress, ruling with reason, law and truth, has gained the victory. Men say that Science represents the new, the real, and the living practical thought of the age; and would have her, as the true heiress of knowledge, supplant the old as a basis of training in our schools and colleges. But she is neither haughty nor bellicose; she recognizes the spirit of all culture which awakens and directs the powers of mind. She respects the music of Virgil and Homer, the logic of Cicero and Demosthenes, and only asks a position of equality. That she is entitled to it, is the universal opinion of men trained in modern thought; and of scores of classic-bred scholars of no less practical knowledge than the younger Adams; no less eminent as an authors and philosophers than Professor Blackie, of Edinburgh University, one of the ripest Greek scholars of our age; no less acknowledged as authorities on the character of literature than De Quincey, who says: "It is a pitiable spectacle to any man of sense and feeling who happens to be really familiar with the golden treasures of his own ancestral language, to see young people squandering their time and painful study upon writers not fit to unloose the shoe-latchets of many amongst their compatriots." He continues: "We engage to produce many scores of passages from Chaucer, not exceeding fifty to eighty lines, which cannot be matched in all the Iliad or the Odyssey." Again: "To our Jeremy
Taylor, to our Sir Thomas Browne there is no approach made in Greek oratory." And finally: "For intellectual qualities of eloquence, in fineness of understanding, in depth and large compass of thought, Burke far surpasses any orator ancient or modern."
The appearance, in 1859, just twenty-five years ago, of Darwin's "Origin of Species," and the almost simultaneous announcement of Herbert Spencer that "Evolution is a universal principle," marked the beginning of an impulse given to thought and investigation, the most splendid of the nineteenth century.
The doctrine set forth was branded on every side as a groundless and absurd speculation, which if tolerated would sap the existing principles of social order and mock at the faith of our tenderest hopes. Yet it lives and men are not worse, nor less happy. Yea! more, it has fastened itself as an inseparable principle to all knowledge; not as a "force or cause," but as showing how, by a gradual process of growth and development, an "immense series of changes" related to and dependent upon each other have been produced. In biology, in its simplest form, it shows how individual man is developed from a minute, jelly-like cell in the ovum; in its more complex relations it is illustrated by all the changes affecting the multiplication of types and species. In physical science, it is the nucleus of the nebular hypothesis, which is the theory of the development of worlds in space. In political and social science, its unfolding is seen in the origin and growth of language, art, and all human institutions. In metaphysics, it appears again in the development of mind and perhaps conscience; and the idea is held by some of the ablest thinkers that "there are very convincing reasons why the natural laws should be continuous through the spiritual world." Wrapped in the habits and traditions of early training, philosophy is slow to accept the idea