Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, November 1899: Volume LVI, No. 1 — John Shaqi
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, November 1899: Volume LVI, No. 1Various
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, November 1899: Volume LVI, No. 1
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
admirable condition of affairs was largely brought about by the zeal
and enterprise of Dr. Donald MacAlister, of St. John's College, the
University Lecturer in Therapeutics, a man of wide sympathies and
ability, and whose name is closely associated with this university's
metamorphosis into a more modern institution.
THE WONDERFUL CENTURY.[1]
A REVIEW BY W. K. BROOKS,
PROFESSOR OF ZOÖLOGY IN THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY.
Every naturalist has in his heart a warm affection for the author of
the Malay Archipelago, and is glad to acknowledge with gratitude his
debt to this great explorer and thinker and teacher who gave us the law
of natural selection independently of Darwin. When the history of our
century is written, the foremost place among those who have guided the
thought of their generation and opened new fields for discovery will
assuredly be given to Wallace and Darwin.
[1] Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, 1899.
Few of the great men who have helped to make our century memorable
in the history of thought are witnesses of its end, and all who have
profited by the labors of Wallace will rejoice that he has been
permitted to stand on the threshold of a new century, and, reviewing
the past, to give us his impressions of the wonderful century.
We men of the nineteenth century, he says, have not been slow to praise
it. The wise and the foolish, the learned and the unlearned, the poet
and the pressman, the rich and the poor, alike swell the chorus of
admiration for the marvelous inventions and discoveries of our own age,
and especially for those innumerable applications of science which now
form part of our daily life, and which remind us every hour of our
immense superiority over our comparatively ignorant forefathers.
Our century, he tells us, has been characterized by a marvelous and
altogether unprecedented progress in the knowledge of the universe and
of its complex forces, and also in the application of that knowledge
to an infinite variety of purposes calculated, if properly utilized,
to supply all the wants of every human being and to add greatly to the
comforts, the enjoyments, and the refinements of life. The bounds of
human knowledge have been so far extended that new vistas have opened
to us in nearly all directions where it had been thought that we could
never penetrate, and the more we learn the more we seem capable of
learning in the ever-widening expanse of the universe. It may, he
says, be truly said of the men of science that they have become as
gods knowing good and evil, since they have been able not only to
utilize the most recondite powers of Nature in their service, but have
in many cases been able to discover the sources of much of the evil
that afflicts humanity, to abolish pain, to lengthen life, and to add
immensely to the intellectual as well as the physical enjoyments of our
race.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account