It would be impossible within due limits to pass in review, even in the most sketchy fashion, the advance made in natural science, especially as each province of the whole realm of knowledge has become divided and sub-divided into sections, each the peculiar department of specialists.|The Advance of Natural Science.| Three hundred years ago it was possible for Francis Bacon to survey the entire firmament of human understanding, but in the nineteenth century the task accomplished in the Advancement of Learning and the Novum Organum has developed to a scale only to be compassed in such a prodigious publication as the “Encyclopædia Britannica,” of which the latest edition consists of twenty-five volumes in quarto, containing upwards of 20,750 pages printed in double columns, contributed by no less than 1,200 different writers, besides translators and revisers.
From a Photograph] [by R. Milne, Aboyne.
HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN, THE PRINCE OF WALES, THE CZAR AND CZARINA AND THEIR INFANT DAUGHTER.
Photographed at Balmoral, November 1896.
In no department of science, perhaps, has progress brought such immediate benefit to the people as in that of surgery and medicine. |Surgery and Medicine.| The introduction of anæsthetics has been mentioned in an earlier chapter; the present year, 1897, is the jubilee anniversary of that blessed event. The vaccination laws were consolidated in 1871, and universal vaccination insisted on, with the result that a loathsome disease, which formerly brought unspeakable misery upon all civilised nations has been practically vanquished. The deaths from small-pox in England, which, at the close of the last century, were reckoned at 3,000 per million, had sunk in the decade from 1878–87 to 54 per million. Attempts have been made persistently by a small minority to resist compulsory vaccination. Persons inclined to listen to arguments against this legislation on the score of undue interference with liberty, should study the Report of the Local Government Board upon an outbreak of small-pox in Sheffield in 1887–88. Of 6,088 persons attacked 590 died; among children under ten years of age, 5 per 1,000 of those vaccinated were attacked and ·09 per 1,000 died; of the unvaccinated, 101 per 1,000 were attacked and 44 per 1,000 died.
From a Photograph] [by Miss Acland.
PROFESSOR RUSKIN.
John Ruskin was born in London in 1819, and matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1836. He published the first volume of “Modern Painters” in 1841, and was elected first Slade Professor of Art in the University of Oxford, 1870.