The extraordinary circumstances under which Wills are sometimes made have given rise to the following suggestive remarks by an able writer in the Saturday Review:—
“If the matter is considered in reference to general principles, there is no more curious power in the world than the right which people exercise by Will of legislating after they are dead and gone, without restraint and without appeal; and it is perhaps even more singular that they exercise this power without being subject to any formalities whatever except the presence of two witnesses. To sell a house or a field is a matter which requires care and inquiry, and the circumstances ensure a certain degree of notoriety. But property of any amount may be disposed of in any way that caprice may dictate by an instrument which may be executed under any circumstances, and kept in any custody. No one but the testator need know its contents, and he may, and often does, prepare it with the most wanton caprice, and leave it in the most absurd depository to take its chance of loss or discovery as it may happen. It is well worth consideration whether the unlimited power which the law of England confers of making whatever Wills a testator chooses ought not to be qualified by some special provisions as to the manner in which such wills should be made.”
Progress of Science.
What human Science has accomplished.
If we reflect on the extreme feebleness of the natural means by the help of which so many great problems have been attacked and solved; if we consider that to obtain and measure the greater part of the quantities now forming the basis of astronomical computation, man has had greatly to improve the most delicate of his organs, to add immensely to the power of his eye; if we remark that it was not less requisite for him to discover methods adapted to measuring very long intervals of time, up to the precision of tenths of seconds; to combat against the most microscopic effects that constant variations of temperature produce in metals, and therefore in all instruments; to guard against the innumerable illusions that a cold or hot atmosphere, dry or humid, tranquil or agitated, impresses on the medium through which the observations have inevitably to be made; the feeble being resumes all his advantage: by the side of such wonderful labours of the mind, what signifies the weakness, the fragility of our body; what signify the dimensions of the planet, our residence, the grain of sand on which it has happened to us to appear for a few moments!—Arago.
Changes in Social Science.
The conquests of science over the realms of matter in our day would scarcely have affected Bacon with greater surprise than the change in what we may call the social position of science. There was a time, not so very far removed from his own, when scientific truth was worshipped, if at all, with closed doors and in muffled accents. Science, like religion, had her age of persecution and her “church in the catacombs;” she, too, had heroes, and martyrs, and confessors of her own, and won her way to popularity through an ordeal of shame and suffering, the history of which remains to be written. The philosopher of the Middle Ages shunned the haunts of men; his crucible was heated in some secret or underground chamber; his knowledge was a forbidden lore, and if it showed itself in the command of new powers, was ascribed, not to inspiration from on high, but to dealings with an agent which even modern credulity so often proclaims as the source of intellectual mastery. From these fiery trials science has emerged without even a scar upon her. Militant she still is, but she is also triumphant, and vies with the learning of “letters,” which was never branded with the like infamy, in the number and dignity of her votaries. The change which has come over her social status has reacted on her doctrines. There are no longer any “mysteries” of science; “problems,” and even “apparent contradictions,” remain, but mysteries, with everything else that savours of the occult and esoteric, are exploded, and not many difficulties are admitted.—Times.