who appeared to represent
not only the male sex in general, but the London press in particular.

Professor Robertson commenced by a brief and well-timed reference to the
accomplished Hypatia, familiar to ladies from Kingsley's novel--in the
days when ladies used to read novels--and also the Royal ladies whom
Descartes and Leibnitz found apter disciples than the savants. It was,
however, he remarked, an impertinence to suppose that any apology was
needed for introducing such subjects before ladies. He plunged therefore
at once in medias res, and made his first lecture not a mere isolated or
introductory one, but the actual commencement of his series. Unreasoned
facts, he said, formed but a mere fraction of our knowledge--even the
simplest processes resolving themselves into a chain of inference. Truth
is the result of logical reasoning; and not only truth, but truth _for
all_. The sciences deal with special aspects of truth. These sciences
may be arranged in the order--1. Mathematics; 2. Physics; 3. Chemistry;
4. Biology--each gradually narrowing its sphere; the one enclosed, so to
say, in the other, and each presupposing those above it. Logic was
presupposed in all. Each might be expressed by a word ending in "logy,"
therefore logic might be termed the "science of sciences." The sciences
were special applications of logic. Scientific men speak lightly of
logic, and say truth can be discovered without it. This is true, but
trivial. We may as well object to physiology because we can digest
without a knowledge of it; or to arithmetic, because it is possible to
reckon without it. Scientific progress has been great; but its course
might have been strewn with fewer wrecks had its professors been more
generally logicians. But then logic presupposes something else. We have
to investigate the origin and growth of knowledge--the laws under which
knowledge comes to be. Under one aspect this science--psychology--should
be placed highest up in the scale; but under another it would rank later
in point of development than even biology itself, because it is not
every being that thinks. This twofold aspect is accounted for by the
peculiarity of its subject-matter--viz., mind.

The sciences are comparatively modern. Mathematics but some 3000 or 4000
years old; physics, three centuries; chemistry, a thing of the last,
biology only of the present century. But men philosophized before the
sciences. The ancient Greeks had but one science--ma