t to have desired to enter it, to have saluted it
from afar, is already, perhaps, the best distinction among contemporaries;
it will certainly be the best title to esteem with posterity.

SIR MICHAEL FOSTER

THE GROWTH OF SCIENCE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY[2]

The eyes of the young look ever forward; they take little heed of the
short though ever-lengthening fragment of life which lies behind them;
they are wholly bent on that which is to come. The eyes of the aged turn
wistfully again and again to the past; as the old glide down the
inevitable slope, their present becomes a living over again the life which
has gone before, and the future takes on the shape of a brief lengthening
of the past. May I this evening venture to give rein to the impulses of
advancing years? May I, at this last meeting of the association in the
eighteen hundreds, dare to dwell for a while upon the past, and to call to
mind a few of the changes which have taken place in the world since those
autumn days in which men were saying to each other that the last of the
seventeen hundreds was drawing toward its end?

Dover, in the year of our Lord 1799, was in many ways unlike the Dover of
to-day. On moonless nights men groped their way in its narrow streets by
the help of swinging lanterns and smoky torches, for no lamps lit the
ways. By day the light of the sun struggled into the houses through narrow
panes of blurred glass. Though the town then, as now, was one of the chief
portals to and from the countries beyond the seas, the means of travel was
scanty and dear, available for the most part to the rich alone, and for
all beset with discomfort and risk. Slow and uncertain was the carriage
of goods, and the news of the world outside came to the town (though it,
from its position, learned more than most towns) tardily, fitfully, and
often falsely. The people of Dover sat then much in dimness, if not in
darkness, and lived in large measure on themselves. They who study the
phenomena of living beings tell us that light is the great stimulus of
life, and that the fullness of the life of a being or of any of its
members may be measured by the variety, the swiftness, and the certainty
of the means by which it is in touch with its surroundings. Judged from
this standpoint, life at Dover then, as indeed elsewhere, must have fallen
far short of the life of to-day.

The same study of living beings, however, teaches us that while from one
point of vie