This is the less remarkable when we reflect what a hard fight geology has had. A generation after Newton's death fossils were referred for their origin to a certain "plastic power" in Nature—mere idle whittlings of bone that had never known an outfit of flesh and blood. Then came a long and motley procession of cosmogonies, every speculator, from John Wesley down to Pye Smith, insisting warmly on what seemed good in his own eyes. The last stand was made on the antiquity of man, and it is only a dozen years since the ablest of British—perhaps since Cuvier of modern—geologists, Sir Charles Lyell, yielded to the preponderance of evidence, and confessed that the era of man's appearance on earth had been made too recent. A few determined skirmishers still linger behind the line of retreat, like Ney at the bridge of Kowno, and fire some fruitless shots at the advancing enemy. This is well. Tribulation and opposition are good for any creed, scientific or other. It weeds out the weak ones and strengthens those that are to stand.
The mapping out of extinct faunas and floras and assigning pedigree to existing species are by no means the whole province of geologists. Productive industry owes to them a vast saving of time and cost in searching for useful minerals. They distinguish the same strata in widely separated districts by means of the characteristic fossils, and are thus enabled to guide the miner. A geological survey of its territory is one of the first cares of an enlightened government, and a geologist is the one scientific official the leading States of the Union agree in maintaining. The science has moved forward steadily from its original office of studying buried deposits and classifying extinct organisms, until the hard and fast line between fossil and recent has disappeared, the continuous action of ordinary causes in past and present been established, and an unbroken domain assigned to the laws of the visible creation. Deep-sea soundings have extended inquiry, slight enough as yet, to that immensely preponderant portion of the globe's crust that is covered by water. Penetrating the ocean is like penetrating the rocks, inasmuch as it introduces us to some of the same primal forms of life; but it presents them in an active and sentient state. Neptune's ravished secrets vindicate the Neptunists, while Pluto is relegated to the abode assigned him by classic myths, where he and his comrade, Vulcan, keep their furnaces alight and project their slag and smoke through many a roaring chimney.
Upon (as beneath) the deep, science is erecting for itself new homes. It tracks the wandering wind, and moves at ease, calmly as a surveyor with chain and compass, through the eddies of the cyclone. It maps for the sailor the currents, aerial and subaqueous, of each spot on the unmarked main, and sends him warning far ahead of the tempest. It divides with the thermometer the mass of brine into horizontal zones, and assigns to each its special population.
A hundred years ago, only the surface of the land was studied, and but a small part of that. All beneath its surface was a mystery, and the lore of the sea was untouched. Now, knowledge has penetrated to the central fire, and of the sea it can be no longer said that man's "control stops with its shores." The pathway of his messenger from continent to continent he has laid deep in its chalky ooze, while over it silt silently, flake by flake, as they have been falling since æons before his creation, the induviæ of the earliest creatures.
And this his messenger at the bottom of the sea is back in its old home. First hidden in the electron cast up by the waves of the Baltic, it was left there, uncomprehended and barren, till our century. During all that time it was calling from the clouds to man's dazzled eye and deafened ear. It pervaded the air he breathed, the ground he trod and the frame which constituted him. It bore his will from brain to hand, and guarded his life, through the (so-called) spontaneously acting muscles of the thorax, during the half or third of his life during which his will slumbered. At length its call was hearkened to intelligently. Franklin made it articulate. Its twin Champollions came in Volta and Galvani. Its few first translated words have, under a host of elucidators, swelled to volumes. They link into one language the dialects of light, motion and heat. The indurated turpentine of the Pomeranian beach speaks the tongue of the farthest star.
The sciences, like the nations and like bees, as they grow too large for their hive are perpetually swarming and colonizing. Not that colonization is followed, as in the case of the similitude, by independence. Their mutual bonds become closer and closer. But convenience and (so to speak) comfort require the nominal separation. So electricity sets up for itself; and chemistry, the metropolis, swells into other offshoots. So numerous and so great are these that the old alchemists, unlimited range through the material, immaterial and supernatural as they claimed for their art, would rub their eyes, bleared over blowpipe and alembic, at sight of its present riches. The half-hewn block handed down by these worthies—not by any means
but blurred and scratched all over with childish and unmeaning scrawls—has been wholly transformed. Chemistry no longer assumes to read our future, but it does a great deal to brighten our present. Laboring to supply the wants and enhance the pleasures and security of daily life, it makes excursions with a sure foot in the opposite direction of abstruse problems in natural philosophy. It analyzes all substances, determines their relations, and tries to guide the artisan in utilizing its acquisitions for the general good. To enumerate these, or to give the merest sketch of chemical progress within the century, would fill many pages. It has enriched and invigorated all the arts by supplying new material and new processes. Illuminating gas, photography, the anæsthetics, the artificial fertilizers, quinine, etc. are a few of its more familiarly known contributions. It has aided medical jurisprudence, and so far checked crime. Besides enlarging the pharmacopoeia, it has promoted sanitary reform in many ways, notably by ascertaining the media of contagion in disease and providing for their detection and removal. Its triumphs are so closely interwoven with the appliances of common life that we are prone to lose sight of them. From the aniline dye that beautifies a picture or a dress, to the explosive that lifts a reef or mines the Alps for a highway, the gradations are infinite and multiform.
Heavy as is the draft of the material sciences upon the thought and energy of the century, it has not monopolized them. No trifling resources have been left for mere abstract investigation. If meta-physics stands, despite the labors of Stewart, Hamilton, Hegel, Comte, very much where it did when Socrates ran amuck among the casuistical Quixotes of his day, and left the philosophic tilters of Greece, the knights-errant in search of the supreme good, in the same plight with the chivalry of Spain after Cervantes, the science of mind, and particularly mental pathology, has made some steps forward on crutches furnished by the medical profession. The treatment of insanity is on a more rational and efficient footing. The statistician collects, and invites the moral philosopher to collate, the records of crime. The naturalist studies the life of the lower animals, and gives the coup de grace to the uncompromising distinction drawn by human conceit between instinct and intelligence.