The Project Gutenberg EBook of Little Masterpieces of Science:, by Various

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Title: Little Masterpieces of Science:
The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer

Author: Various

Editor: George Iles

Release Date: August 20, 2009 [EBook #29739]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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LITTLE MASTERPIECES OF SCIENCE

[Illustration: Charles R. Darwin.]

Little Masterpieces
of Science

Edited by George Iles

THE NATURALIST AS INTERPRETER AND SEER

_By_

Charles Darwin
Alfred R. Wallace
Thomas H. Huxley
Leland O. Howard
George Iles

NEW YORK

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

1902

Copyright, 1902, by Doubleday, Page & Co.

Copyright, 1877, by D. Appleton & Co.

Copyright, 1901, by John Wanamaker

Copyright, 1895, by G. H. Buek & Co.

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES: Obvious printer's errors have been silently
corrected. Hyphenated and accented words have been standardized. See
the end of this file for more information.

PREFACE

To gather stones and fallen boughs is soon to ask, what may be done with
them, can they be piled and fastened together for shelter? So begins
architecture, with the hut as its first step, with the Alhambra, St.
Peter's, the capitol at Washington, as its last. In like fashion the
amassing of fact suggests the ordering of fact: when observation is
sufficiently full and varied it comes to the reasons for what it sees.
The geologist delves from layer to layer of the earth beneath his tread,
he finds as he compares their fossils that the more recent forms of life
stand highest in the scale of being, that in the main the animals and
plants of one era are more allied to those immediately next than to
those of remoter times. He thus divines that he is but exploring the
proofs of lineal descent, and with this thought in his mind he finds
that the collections not only of his own district, but of every other,
take on a new meaning. The great seers of science do not aw