ed to or mentioned along with Newton without a shudder. The stage
in which he found biology seems to me far more comparable with the
Ptolemaic era in astronomy, and he himself to be quite fairly comparable
to Copernicus.

Let us proceed to summarize the stage at which the human race had
arrived at the epoch with which we are now dealing.

The Copernican view of the solar system had been stated, restated,
fought, and insisted on; a chain of brilliant telescopic discoveries had
made it popular and accessible to all men of any intelligence:
henceforth it must be left to slowly percolate and sink into the minds
of the people. For the nations were waking up now, and were accessible
to new ideas. England especially was, in some sort, at the zenith of its
glory; or, if not at the zenith, was in that full flush of youth and
expectation and hope which is stronger and more prolific of great deeds
and thoughts than a maturer period.

A common cause against a common and detested enemy had roused in the
hearts of Englishmen a passion of enthusiasm and patriotism; so that the
mean elements of trade, their cheating yard-wands, were forgotten for a
time; the Armada was defeated, and the nation's true and conscious adult
life began. Commerce was now no mere struggle for profit and hard
bargains; it was full of the spirit of adventure and discovery; a new
world had been opened up; who could tell what more remained unexplored?
Men awoke to the splendour of their inheritance, and away sailed Drake
and Frobisher and Raleigh into the lands of the West.

For literature, you know what a time it was. The author of _Hamlet_ and
_Othello_ was alive: it is needless to say more. And what about science?
The atmosphere of science is a more quiet and less stirring one; it
thrives best when the fever of excitement is allayed; it is necessarily
a later growth than literature. Already, however, our second great man
of science was at work in a quiet country town--second in point of time,
I mean, Roger Bacon being the first. Dr. Gilbert, of Colchester, was the
second in point of time, and the age was ripening for the time when
England was to be honoured with such a galaxy of scientific
luminaries--Hooke and Boyle and Newton--as the world had not yet known.

Yes, the nations were awake. "In all directions," as Draper says,
"Nature was investigated: in all directions new methods of examination
were yielding unexpected and beautiful results. On the ruins