ve been overthrown, and
that on the field thus cleared has sprung up the most abundant harvest
that has ever enriched the domain of science.

It is in fact true that the crop becomes richer and more fruitful,
thanks to the development of our laboratories, and that the quantity
of seekers has considerably increased in all countries, while their
quality has not diminished. We should be sustaining an absolute
paradox, and at the same time committing a crying injustice, were we
to contest the high importance of recent progress, and to seek to
diminish the glory of contemporary physicists. Yet it may be as well
not to give way to exaggerations, however pardonable, and to guard
against facile illusions. On closer examination it will be seen that
our predecessors might at several periods in history have conceived,
as legitimately as ourselves, similar sentiments of scientific pride,
and have felt that the world was about to appear to them transformed
and under an aspect until then absolutely unknown.

Let us take an example which is salient enough; for, however arbitrary
the conventional division of time may appear to a physicist's eyes, it
is natural, when instituting a comparison between two epochs, to
choose those which extend over a space of half a score of years, and
are separated from each other by the gap of a century. Let us, then,
go back a hundred years and examine what would have been the state of
mind of an erudite amateur who had read and understood the chief
publications on physical research between 1800 and 1810.

Let us suppose that this intelligent and attentive spectator witnessed
in 1800 the discovery of the galvanic battery by Volta. He might from
that moment have felt a presentiment that a prodigious transformation
was about to occur in our mode of regarding electrical phenomena.
Brought up in the ideas of Coulomb and Franklin, he might till then
have imagined that electricity had unveiled nearly all its mysteries,
when an entirely original apparatus suddenly gave birth to
applications of the highest interest, and excited the blossoming of
theories of immense philosophical extent.

In the treatises on physics published a little later, we find traces
of the astonishment produced by this sudden revelation of a new world.
"Electricity," wrote the Abbe Hauey, "enriched by the labour of so many
distinguished physicists, seemed to have reached the term when a
science has no further important steps before it,