day that the stars and celestial bodies, the faunas and floras, ceased
to play a certain part in our lives or that the manifold sources of
observation and experience ceased to flow, astronomy and meteorology
would henceforth be brought to a standstill while zoology and botany
would have become palaeontology pure and simple, without speaking of
their application to the navy, army and agriculture, which are all
to-day entirely obsolete; in fact, that they would have ceased to make a
step forward and would have fallen into complete oblivion. Luckily these
apprehensions proved groundless. Let us admire the extent to which the
sciences which the past has bequeathed to us, formerly eminently useful
and inductive, have for the first time had the advantage of passionately
interesting and exciting the general public since they have acquired
this double characteristic of being an object of luxury and a deductive
subject. The past has accumulated such undigested masses of astronomical
tables, papers and proceedings dealing with measurements, vivisections,
and innumerable experiments, that the human mind can live on this
capital till the end of time. It was high time that it began at last to
arrange and utilize these materials. Now, for the sciences of which I am
speaking, the advantage is great from the point of view of their success
that they are entirely based on written testimony, and in no way on
sense perception, and that they on all occasions invoke the authority of
books (for we talk to-day of whole bibliographies when formerly people
spoke of a single Bible--evidently an immense difference). This great
and inestimable advantage consists in the extraordinary riches of our
libraries in documents of the most diverse kinds which never leaves an
ingenious theorist in the lurch, and is equal to supporting in a plenary
and authoritative fashion the most contradictory opinions at one and the
same symposium. Its abundance recalls the admirable wealth of antique
legislation and jurisprudence in texts and decisions of every hue which
rendered the lawsuits so interesting, almost as much as the battles of
the populace of Alexandria on the subject of a theological iota. The
debates of our _savants_, their polemics relative to the Vitellin yolk
of the egg of the Arachneida, or the digestive apparatus of the
Infusoria, constitute the burning questions which distress us, and which
if we had the misfortune to possess a regular press, would not