The Voice of Science in Nineteenth-Century Literature / Representative Prose and Verse

by Unknown

In the year 1799 the knowledge of oxygen, of the nature of water and of air, and indeed the true conception of chemical composition and chemical change, was hardly more than beginning to be; and the century had to pass wholly away before the next great chemical idea, which we know by the name of the atomic theory of John Dalton, was made known. We have only to read the scientific literature of the time to recognize that a truth which is now not only woven as a master-thread into all our scientific conceptions, but even enters largely into the everyday talk and thoughts of educated people, was, a hundred years ago, struggling into existence among the philosophers themselves. It was all but absolutely unknown to the large world outside those select few.

If there be one word of science which is writ large on the life of the present time, it is the word “electricity.” It is, I take it, writ larger than any other word. The knowledge which it denotes has carried its practical results far and wide into our daily life, while the theoretical conceptions which it signifies pierce deep into the nature of things. We are to-day proud, and justly proud, both of the material triumphs and of the intellectual gains which it has brought us, and we are full of even larger hopes of it in the future.

At what time did this bright child of the nineteenth century have its birth?

He who listened to the small group of philosophers of Dover, who in 1799 might have discoursed of natural knowledge, would perhaps have heard much of electric machines, of electric sparks, of the electric fluid, and even of positive and negative electricity; for frictional electricity had long been known and even carefully studied. Probably one or more of the group, dwelling on the observations which Galvani, an Italian, had made known some twenty years before, developed views on the connection of electricity with the phenomena of living bodies. Possibly one of them was exciting the rest by telling how he had just heard that a professor at Pavia, one Volta, had discovered that electricity could be produced, not only by rubbing together particular bodies, but by the simple contact of two metals, and had thereby explained Galvani’s remarkable results. For, indeed, as we shall hear from Professor Fleming, it was in that very year, 1799, that electricity as we now know it took its birth. It was then that Volta brought to light the apparently simple truths out of which so much has sprung. The world, it is true, had to wait for yet some twenty years before both the practical and theoretic worth of Volta’s discovery became truly pregnant under the fertilizing influence of another discovery. The loadstone and its magnetic virtues had, like the electrifying power of rubbed amber, long been an old story. But, save for the compass, not much had come from it. And even Volta’s discovery might have long remained relatively barren had it been left to itself. When, however, in 1819, Oersted made known his remarkable observations on the relations of electricity to magnetism, he made the contact needed for the flow of a new current of ideas. And it is perhaps not too much to say that those ideas, developing during the years of the rest of the century with an ever-accelerating swiftness, have wholly changed man’s material relations to the circumstances of life, and at the same time carried him far in his knowledge of the nature of things.

Of all the various branches of science, none perhaps is to-day, none for these many years past has been, so well known to, even if not understood by, most people as that of geology. Its practical lessons have brought wealth to many; its fairy tales have brought delight to more; and round it hovers the charm of danger, for the conclusions to which it leads touch on the nature of man’s beginning.

In 1799 the science of geology, as we now know it, was struggling into birth. There had been from of old cosmogonies, theories as to how the world had taken shape out of primeval chaos. In that fresh spirit which marked the zealous search after natural knowledge pursued in the middle and latter part of the seventeenth century, the brilliant Stenson, in Italy, and Hooke, in England, had laid hold of some of the problems presented by fossil remains, and Woodward, with others, had labored in the same field. In the eighteenth century, especially in its latter half, men’s minds were busy about the physical agencies determining or modifying the features of the earth’s crust; water and fire, subsidence from a primeval ocean and transformation by outbursts of the central heat, Neptune and Pluto were being appealed to, by Werner on the one hand and by Demarest on the other, in explanation of the earth’s phenomena. The way was being prepared, theories and views were abundant, and many sound observations had been made; and yet the science of geology, properly so called, the exact and proved knowledge of the successive phases of the world’s life, may be said to date from the closing years of the eighteenth century.

In 1783 James Hutton put forward in a brief memoir his Theory of the Earth, which, in 1795, two years before his death, he expanded into a book; but his ideas failed to lay hold of men’s minds until the century had passed away, when, in 1802, they found an able expositor in John Playfair. The very same year that Hutton published his book, Cuvier came to Paris and almost forthwith began, with Brongniart, his immortal researches into the fossils of Paris and its neighborhood. And four years later, in the year 1799 itself, William Smith’s tabular list of strata and fossils saw the light. It is, I believe, not too much to say that out of these, geology, as we now know it, sprang.

It was thus in the closing years of the eighteenth century that was begun the work which the nineteenth century has carried forward to such great results; but at this time only the select few had grasped the truth, and even they only the beginning of it. Outside a narrow circle the thoughts even of the educated about the history of the globe were bounded by the story of the Deluge,—though the story was often told in a strange fashion,—or were guided by fantastic views of the plastic forces of a sportive nature.

In another branch of science, in that which deals with the problems presented by living beings, the thoughts of men in 1799 were also very different from the thoughts of men to-day. It is a very old quest, the quest after the knowledge of the nature of living beings, one of the earliest on which man set out; for it promised to lead him to a knowledge of himself—a promise which perhaps is still before us, but the fulfillment of which is yet far off. As time has gone on, the pursuit of natural knowledge has seemed to lead man away from himself into the furthermost parts of the universe, and into secret workings of Nature in which he appears to be of little or no account; and his knowledge of the nature of living things, and so of his own nature, has advanced slowly, waiting till the progress of other branches of natural knowledge can bring it aid. Yet in the past hundred years the biologic sciences, as we now call them, have marched rapidly onward.

We may look upon a living body as a machine doing work in accordance with certain laws, and may seek to trace out the working of the inner wheels: how these raise up the lifeless dust into living matter, and let the living matter fall away again into dust, giving out movement and heat. Or we may look upon the individual life as a link in a long chain, joining something which went before to something about to come, a chain whose beginning lies hid in the farthest past, and may seek to know the ties which bind one life to another. As we call up to view the long series of living forms, living now or flitting like shadows on the screen of the past, we may strive to lay hold of the influences which fashion the garment of life. Whether the problems of life are looked upon from the one point of view or the other, we to-day, not biologists only, but all of us, have gained a knowledge hidden even from the philosophers a hundred years ago.