The spirit of bigotry, in former times, jealously watched every innovation. Telescopes and microscopes were denounced as atheistic, winnowing machines were denounced in Scotland as impious, and even forks when first introduced were denounced by preachers as “an insult on Providence not to eat our meat with our fingers.”
It is not strange that the last fifty years have sufficed to cover with a cloud of collegiate ignorance and bigotry the discoveries of the illustrious Gall, for whom I am doing a similar service, to that of Copernicus for Pythagoras.
This is nothing unusual in the progress of Science. There was no brighter genius in physical science at the beginning of this century than Dr. Thomas Young, who died in 1829, whose discoveries fell into obscurity until they were revived by more recent investigation. He had that intuitive genius which is most rare among scientists.
He was a great thinker and discoverer, who knew how to utilize in philosophy discovered facts, and was not busy like many modern scientists in the monotonous repetition of experiments which had already been performed.
“At no period of his life was he fond of repeating experiments or even of originating new ones. He considered that however necessary to the advancement of science, they demanded a great sacrifice of time, and that when a fact was once established, time was better employed in considering the purposes to which it might be applied, or the principles which it might tend to elucidate.”
He says, in his Bakerian lecture, “Nor is it absolutely necessary in this instance to produce a single new experiment; for of experiments there is already an ample store.”
In a letter to his sister-in-law, Mrs. Earle, he says, “Acute suggestion was then, and indeed always, more in the line of my ambition than experimental illustration,” and on another occasion, referring to the Wollaston fund for experimental inquiries, he said, “For my part, it is my pride and pleasure, as far as I am able, to supersede the necessity of experiments, and more especially of expensive ones.” The famous Prof. Helmholtz said of Young:
“The theory of colors with all their marvellous and complicated relations, was a riddle which Goethe in vain attempted to solve, nor were we physicists and physiologists more successful. I include myself in the number, for I long toiled at the task without getting any nearer my object, until I at last discovered that a wonderfully simple solution had been discovered at the beginning of this century, and had been in print ever since for any one to read who chose. This solution was found and published by the same Thomas Young, who first showed the right method of arriving at the interpretation of Egyptian hieroglyphics.”
“He was one of the most acute men who ever lived, but had the misfortune to be too far in advance of his contemporaries. They looked on him with astonishment, but could not follow his bold speculations, and thus a mass of his most important thoughts remained buried and forgotten in the ‘Transactions of the Royal Society,’ until a later generation by slow degrees arrived at the re-discovery of his discoveries, and came to appreciate the force of his argument and the accuracy of his conclusions.”
This half century of passive resistance to science, in the case of Dr. Young and Dr. Gall, is nothing unusual. It was 286 years from the day when Bruno, the eloquent philosopher, was burned at the stake by the Catholic Church, before a statue was prepared to honor his memory in Italy.
What was the reception of the illustrious surgeon, physiologist, and physician, John Hunter? While he lived, “most of his contemporaries looked upon him as little better than an enthusiast and an innovator,” according to his biographer; and when, in 1859, it was decided to inter his remains in Westminster Abbey, it was hard to find his body, which was at last discovered in a vault along with 2000 others piled upon it.