MEMOIRS OF ABERNETHY.
CHAPTER I.
"The Author of Nature appears deliberate throughout His operations, accomplishing His natural ends by slow successive steps. And there is a plan of things beforehand laid out, which, from the nature of it, requires various systems of means, as well as length of time, in order to the carrying on its several parts into execution."—Butler's Analogy.
A retrospect of the history of human knowledge offers to our contemplation few things of deeper interest than the evidence it so repeatedly affords of some great law which regulates the gradual development of truth, and determines the Progress of Discovery.
Although knowledge has, at times, appeared to exhibit something of uniformity in its advances, yet it cannot have escaped the least observant that, as a whole, the Progress of Science has been marked by very variable activity—at one time, marvellously rapid; at another, indefinitely slow; now merged in darkness or obscurity; and now blazing forth with meridian splendour.
We observe a series of epochs divided by intervals of great apparent irregularity—intervals which we can neither calculate nor explain; but which, nevertheless, exhibit a periodicity, which the very irregularity serves to render striking and impressive.
We may remark, also, a peculiar fitness in the minds of those to whom the enunciation of truth has been successively entrusted: a fitness, not merely for the tasks which have been assigned to each, as the special mission of the individual, but also in the relations of different minds to each other. This adaptation to ends which individual minds have unconsciously combined to accomplish, might be illustrated by many examples, from the earliest records of antiquity, down to our own times. This would be incompatible with our present purpose. We will therefore only refer to one or two illustrations, which, as being familiar, will serve to show what we mean, and to lead us, not unnaturally, to our more immediate object.