area was confined the exercise of their reasoning faculties. Viewed in comparison with the vast body of contemporary science, all the information acquired by the Greeks must appear as an inconsiderable residue scarcely capable of conveying a perceptible tinge to the whole mass. For fully eighteen hundred years, from the age of Aristotle to that of Columbus and Copernicus, no advance was made in the elucidation of natural phenomena or even towards exploring the surface of the globe. The same globe has been surveyed and delineated in its widest extent by the industry of our cartographers, has been seamed with a labyrinth of railways for the conveyance of substance, and invested in a network of wire for the transmission of thought. In the universe of suns our solar system appears to us as a minute and isolated disc, the earth a speck within that disc; to the ancients the revelations of telescopic astronomy were undreamt of, and the world they inhabited (all but a tithe of which was concealed from them, and whose form they only mistily realized) seemed to them to be the heart of the universe, of which the rest of the celestial bodies were assumed to be merely subordinate appendages. Geological investigation has penetrated the past history of the earth through a million of centuries to those primeval times when meteorological conditions first favoured the existence of organic life; the people of antiquity were blinded by unfounded legends which antedated the origin of things to a few thousand years before their own age. Spectroscopic observation has assimilated the composition of the most distant stars to that of our own planet. Chemical analysis has achieved the dissolution of the numberless varieties of matter presented to our notice, and proved them to arise merely from diverse combinations of a few simple elements; and electrical research has almost visually ap-
