works of those who are doing their best to interpret Nature on this basis, that the views of the objectors are more tenable, though there are too many who for some reason imagine that, if an author can be found to be in error in some point, his fundamental principles are not trustworthy. That would be as if Kepler should condemn the Copernican system when he found that the planets move in elliptical orbits instead of circular ones, as was assumed by Copernicus, and should say that Copernicus "would talk pretentiously about matters that he knew nothing about."
The astronomer pays no more attention to old theories of his science than he does to astrology. He even says of Kant's presentation of the nebular theory that he gives no reason for it that an astronomer is bound to respect. No chemist to-day needs to know or care what anybody thought about chemistry before Dalton. No physicist to-day needs to know or care what any one thought of electricity before Faraday. Even Franklin's opinion carries no weight. In heat Rumford and Davy are the first whose opinions have any value. In biology nobody appeals to Cuvier or Agassiz. Psychology was revolutionized by the p ublication of Mr. Spencer's works in 1855; and the other day Ferrier was honored in England for his work in the localization of mental faculties. The new sciences of ethnology and comparitive philology have also revolutionized all notions as to the history of mankind. Histories of the past, written within the last fifty years, are of no more account than the stories of Herodotus and Diodorus about the Egyptians and Assyrians.
About twenty-five years ago Lenormant, the French historian, announced as nearly ready for publication a history of India. In 1870 he notified the public that he had abandoned the work, having made the discovery that most of the data he had collected were worthless and that it was impossible to get anything that was trustworthy. Henshaw, of the Anthropological Society of Washington, declares that the languages of the Indians of this country, of which there were fifty-eight linguistic families and three hundred dialects, north of Mexico, at the time of the discovery of America, are none of them related in any way to Asiatic tongues; also, as to the origin of the Indian, it must have been in ages so far removed from our own time that the interval is to be reckoned, not in years of chronology, but by the epoch of geologic time.
Again, what shall we think on religious matters when a man like Le Conte states that we are on, the verge of a profound and radical change in the basis of Christian beliefs; when Rev. Dr. Martineau, whose life has been spent in the defense of historic Christianity, concludes as the result of his best endeavors to discover the truth, and whose hopes and wishes and expectations
