r him. Only two or three men appeared in a generation who,
working alone, could make real progress in discovery, and even these
could do little in leavening the minds of their fellowmen with the new
ideas.

Up to the middle of the seventeenth century an agent which all
experience since that time shows to be necessary to the most productive
intellectual activity was wanting. This was the attrition of like
minds, making suggestions to one another, criticising, comparing, and
reasoning. This element was introduced by the organization of the Royal
Society of London and the Academy of Sciences of Paris.

The members of these two bodies seem like ingenious youth suddenly
thrown into a new world of interesting objects, the purposes and
relations of which they had to discover. The novelty of the situation
is strikingly shown in the questions which occupied the minds of the
incipient investigators. One natural result of British maritime
enterprise was that the aspirations of the Fellows of the Royal Society
were not confined to any continent or hemisphere. Inquiries were sent
all the way to Batavia to know "whether there be a hill in Sumatra
which burneth continually, and a fountain which runneth pure balsam."
The astronomical precision with which it seemed possible that
physiological operations might go on was evinced by the inquiry whether
the Indians can so prepare that stupefying herb Datura that "they make
it lie several days, months, years, according as they will, in a man's
body without doing him any harm, and at the end kill him without
missing an hour's time." Of this continent one of the inquiries was
whether there be a tree in Mexico that yields water, wine, vinegar,
milk, honey, wax, thread and needles.

Among the problems before the Paris Academy of Sciences those of
physiology and biology took a prominent place. The distillation of
compounds had long been practised, and the fact that the more
spirituous elements of certain substances were thus separated naturally
led to the question whether the essential essences of life might not be
discoverable in the same way. In order that all might participate in
the experiments, they were conducted in open session of the academy,
thus guarding against the danger of any one member obtaining for his
exclusive personal use a possible elixir of life. A wide range of the
animal and vegetable kingdom, including cats, dogs and birds of various
species, were thus analyzed. The pra