ILLUSTRATIONS PLATES FACING PAGE I. WISDOM, OR THE SPIRIT OF SCIENCE. BY Edwin II. THE SPIRIT OF THE SUMMIT. BY LORD LEIGHTON - Frontispiece 48 III. SCIENCE. BY KENYON COX 112 IV. URANIA - THE MUSE OF ASTRONOMY. By R. VII. SCIENCE REVEALING THE TREASURES OF THE EARTH. 256 VIII. APOTHEOSIS OF THE SCIENCES. BY PAUL ALBERT BESNARD 320 CHAPTER I OUTLOOK AND ENDEAVOUR No good work is ever lost. Max-Müller. There is no darkness but Ignorance. Shakespeare. Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks. Sermons There are three voices of Nature. She joins hands with us and says Struggle, Endeavour. She comes close to us, we can hear her heart beating, she says Wonder, Enjoy, Revere. She whispers secrets to us, we cannot always catch her words, she says Search, Inquire. These, then, are the three voices of Nature, appealing to Hand, and Heart, and Head, to the Trinity of our Being. Prof. J. Arthur Thomson. SINCE dawn the man had been seated on a stone at the bottom of a ravine. Three peasant women on their way to the vineyards exchanged "Good day" with him as they passed to their work. At sunset when they returned the watcher was still there, seated on the same stone, his eyes fixed on the same spot. "A poor innocent," one whispered to the others, 66 pe'caïre! a poor innocent," and all three made the sign of the cross. G.D. D Fabre, the incomparable naturalist, patiently waiting to discover what is instinct and what is reason in insectlife is, to these vintagers, an object of supreme commiseration, an imbecile in God's keeping, wherefore they crossed themselves. Members of the University of Pisa, and other onlookers, are assembled in the space at the foot of the wonderful leaning tower of white marble in that city one morning in the year 1591. A young professor climbs the spiral staircase until he reaches the gallery surmounting the seventh tier of arches. The people below watch him as he balances two balls on the edge of the gallery, one weighing a hundred times more than the other. The balls are released at the same instant and are seen to keep together as they fall through the air until they are heard to strike the ground at the same moment. Nature has spoken with no uncertain sound, and has given an immediate answer to a question debated for two thousand years. "This meddlesome man Galileo must be suppressed," murmured the University fathers as they left the square. Does he think that by showing us that a heavy and a light ball fall to the ground together he can shake our belief in the philosophy which teaches that a ball weighing one hundred pounds would fall one hundred times faster than one weighing a single pound? Such disregard of authority is dangerous, and we will see that it goes no further." So they returned to their books to explain away the evidence of their senses; and they hated the man who had disturbed their philosophic serenity. For putting belief to the test of experiment, and founding conclusions upon observation, Galileo's reward in his old age was imprisonment by the Inquisition, and a broken heart. That is how a |