Edward Huntington Williams

“ And this conservative majority included not laymen merely, but a vast preponderance of the leaders of science also.
With the open-minded minority, on the other hand, the theory of natural selection made its way by leaps and bounds. Its delightful simplicity—which at first sight made it seem neither new nor important—coupled with the marvellous comprehensiveness of its implications, gave it a hold on the imagination, and secured it a hearing where other theories of transmutation of species had been utterly scorned. ”

“ The Animists taught that the soul performed functions of ordinary life in man, while the life of lower animals was controlled by ordinary mechanical principles. Stahl supported this theory ardently, sometimes violently, at times declaring that there were "no longer any doctors, only mechanics and chemists." He denied that chemistry had anything to do with medicine, and, in the main, discarded anatomy as useless to the medical man. The soul, he thought, was the source of all vital movement; and the immediate cause of death was not disease but the direct action of the soul. ”

“ Darwin had all along felt the utmost confidence in the ultimate triumph of his ideas. "Our posterity," he declared, in a letter to Hooker, "will marvel as much about the current belief (in special creation) as we do about fossil shells having been thought to be created as we now see them." But he fully realized that for the present success of his theory of transmutation the championship of a few leaders of science was all-essential. He felt that if he could make converts of Hooker and Lyell and of Thomas Henry Huxley at once, all would be well. ”

“ In this epoch of chemical discoveries England had produced such mental giants and pioneers in science as Black, Priestley, and Cavendish; Sweden had given the world Scheele and Bergman, whose work, added to that of their English confreres, had laid the broad base of chemistry as a science; but it was for France to produce a man who gave the final touches to the broad but rough workmanship of its foundation, and establish it as the science of modern chemistry. ”

“ There is hardly another case in history of a man not a specialist in science accomplishing so much in original research as did this chemist, physiologist, electrician; the mathematician, logician, and moralist; the theologian, mental philosopher, and political economist. He took all knowledge for his field; but how he found time for his numberless researches and multifarious writings, along with his every-day duties, must ever remain a mystery to ordinary mortals. ”

“ Thus the nucleus was restored to the important position which Schwann and Schleiden had given it, but with greatly altered significance. Instead of being a structure generated de novo from non-cellular substance, and disappearing as soon as its function of cell-formation was accomplished, the nucleus was now known as the central and permanent feature of every cell, indestructible while the cell lives, itself the division-product of a pre-existing nucleus, and the parent, by division of its substance, of other generations of nuclei. ”

“ The most casual wanderer in the British Museum can hardly fail to notice two pairs of massive sculptures, in the one case winged bulls, in the other winged lions, both human-headed, which guard the entrance to the Egyptian hall, close to the Rosetta Stone. Each pair of these weird creatures once guarded an entrance to the palace of a king in the famous city of Nineveh. As one stands before them his mind is carried back over some twenty-seven intervening centuries, to the days when the "Cedar of Lebanon" was "fair in his greatness" and the scourge of Israel. ”

“ But even though he lacked the highest art of the versifier, Darwin had, beyond peradventure, the imagination of a poet coupled with profound scientific knowledge; and it was his poetic insight, correlating organisms seemingly diverse in structure and imbuing the lowliest flower with a vital personality, which led him to suspect that there are no lines of demarcation in nature. "Can it be," he queries, "that one form of organism has developed from another; that different species are really but modified descendants of one parent stock?" ”

“ Let us suppose the usual temperature of the earth a little changed, and it is raised only to the degree of boiling water; it is evident that in this case phosphorus, which is combustible in a considerably lower degree of temperature, would no longer exist in nature in its pure and simple state, but would always be procured in its acid or oxygenated state, and its radical would become one of the substances unknown to chemistry. By gradually increasing the temperature of the earth, the same circumstance would successively happen to all the bodies capable of combustion ”

“ These ultimate particles are so small that we cannot see them—cannot, indeed, more than vaguely imagine them—yet each particle of vapor, for example, is just as much a portion of water as if it were a drop out of the ocean, or, for that matter, the ocean itself. But, again, water is a compound substance, for it may be separated, as Cavendish has shown, into the two elementary substances hydrogen and oxygen. Hence the atom of water must be composed of two lesser atoms joined together. Imagine an atom of hydrogen and one of oxygen. Unite them, and we have an atom of water ”

“ The development of the science of chemistry from the "science" of alchemy is a striking example of the complete revolution in the attitude of observers in the field of science. As has been pointed out in a preceding chapter, the alchemist, having a preconceived idea of how things should be, made all his experiments to prove his preconceived theory; while the chemist reverses this attitude of mind and bases his conceptions on the results of his laboratory experiments. In short, chemistry is what alchemy never could be, an inductive science. ”

“ As chemists studied the actions of various kinds of atoms, in regard to their unions with one another to form molecules, it gradually dawned upon them that not all elements are satisfied with the same number of companions. Some elements ask only one, and refuse to take more; while others link themselves, when occasion offers, with two, three, four, or more. Thus we saw that oxygen forsook a single atom of its own kind and linked itself with two atoms of hydrogen. Clearly, then, the oxygen atom, like a creature with two hands, is able to clutch two other atoms. ”

“ To publish this paper with no word from Darwin would give Wallace priority, and wrest from Darwin the credit of a discovery which he had made years before his codiscoverer entered the field. Yet, on the other hand, could Darwin honorably do otherwise than publish his friend's paper and himself remain silent? It was a complication well calculated to try a man's soul. Darwin's was equal to the test. Keenly alive to the delicacy of the position, he placed the whole matter before his friends Hooker and Lyell, and left the decision as to a course of action absolutely to them. ”

“ This essay, expositing ideas by no means exclusively original with Malthus, emphasizes the fact that organisms tend to increase at a geometrical ratio through successive generations, and hence would overpopulate the earth if not somehow kept in check. Cogitating this thought, Darwin gained a new insight into the processes of nature. He saw that in virtue of this tendency of each race of beings to overpopulate the earth, the entire organic world, animal and vegetable, must be in a state of perpetual carnage and strife, individual against individual, fighting for sustenance and life. ”

“ Cavendish is one of the most eccentric figures in the history of science, being widely known in his own time for his immense wealth and brilliant intellect, and also for his peculiarities and his morbid sensibility, which made him dread society, and probably did much in determining his career. Fortunately for him, and incidentally for the cause of science, he was able to pursue laboratory investigations without being obliged to mingle with his dreaded fellow-mortals, his every want being provided for by the immense fortune inherited from his father and an uncle. ”

“ And so it chanced that, in striking the shackles from the insane, Pinel and his confreres struck a blow also, unwittingly, at time-honored philosophical traditions. The liberation of the insane from their dungeons was an augury of the liberation of psychology from the musty recesses of metaphysics. Hitherto psychology, in so far as it existed at all, was but the subjective study of individual minds; in future it must become objective as well, taking into account also the relations which the mind bears to the body, and in particular to the brain and nervous system. ”

“ Haller's greatest contribution to medical science was his famous doctrine of irritability, which has given him the name of "father of modern nervous physiology," just as Harvey is called "the father of the modern physiology of the blood." It has been said of this famous doctrine of irritability that "it moved all the minds of the century—and not in the departments of medicine alone—in a way of which we of the present day have no satisfactory conception, unless we compare it with our modern Darwinism." ”

“ It is a matter of indifference whether the combination takes place rapidly or slowly, at a high or at a low temperature; the amount of heat liberated is a constant quantity. The carbon of the food, which is converted into carbonic acid within the body, must give out exactly as much heat as if it had been directly burned in the air or in oxygen gas; the only difference is that the amount of heat produced is diffused over unequal times. In oxygen the combustion is more rapid and the heat more intense; in air it is slower, the temperature is not so high, but it continues longer. ”

“ The simple rain-gauge pointed the way to the most important generalization of the nineteenth century in a field of science with which, to the casual observer, it might seem to have no alliance whatever. The wonderful theory of atoms, on which the whole gigantic structure of modern chemistry is founded, was the logical outgrowth, in the mind of John Dalton, of those early studies in meteorology. ”

“ All advances in science have a bearing, near or remote, on the welfare of our race; but it remains to credit to the closing decade of the eighteenth century a discovery which, in its power of direct and immediate benefit to humanity, surpasses any other discovery of this or any previous epoch. Needless to say, I refer to Jenner's discovery of the method of preventing smallpox by inoculation with the virus of cow-pox. ”

“ But no inkling of an explanation of these strange variations of molecular structure came until the discovery of the law of valency. Then much of the mystery was cleared away; for it was plain that since each atom in a molecule can hold to itself only a fixed number of other atoms, complex molecules must have their atoms linked in definite chains or groups. And it is equally plain that where the atoms are numerous, the exact plan of grouping may sometimes be susceptible of change without doing violence to the law of valency. It is in such cases that isomerism is observed to occur. ”

“ In Abbot Islip's chapel in Westminster Abbey, close to the resting-place of Ben Jonson, rest the remains of John Hunter (1728-1793) , famous in the annals of medicine as among the greatest physiologists and surgeons that the world has ever produced: a man whose discoveries and inventions are counted by scores, and whose field of research was only limited by the outermost boundaries of eighteenth-century science, although his efforts were directed chiefly along the lines of his profession. ”

“ So at about the time when the microscope had taught that the cell is the really essential structure of the living organism, the chemists had come to understand that every function of the organism is really the expression of a chemical change—that each cell is, in short, a miniature chemical laboratory. ”

“ Called upon constantly to classify the various forms of life in the course of his systematic writings, he found it more and more difficult to draw sharp lines of demarcation, and at last the suspicion long harbored grew into a settled conviction that there is really no such thing as a species of organism in nature; that "species" is a figment of the human imagination, whereas in nature there are only individuals. ”

“ Fauna and flora are here, and, thanks to Lamarck and Wallace and Darwin, their development, through the operation of those "secondary causes" which we call laws of nature, has been proximally explained. The lowest forms of life have been linked with the highest in unbroken chains of descent. Meantime, through the efforts of chemists and biologists, the gap between the inorganic and the organic worlds, which once seemed almost infinite, has been constantly narrowed. Already philosophy can throw a bridge across that gap. ”

“ But if such a metamorphosis as this is possible—if the seemingly wide gap between leaf and stamen may be spanned by the modification of a line of organisms—where does the possibility of modification of organic type find its bounds? Why may not the modification of parts go on along devious lines until the remote descendants of an organism are utterly unlike that organism? Why may we not thus account for the development of various species of beings all sprung from one parent stock? ”

“ The eagle, soaring in the realms of air, Whose eye, undazzled, drinks the solar glare; Imperious man, who rules the bestial crowd, Of language, reason, and reflection proud, With brow erect, who scorns this earthy sod, And styles himself the image of his God— Arose from rudiments of form and sense, An embryon point or microscopic ens! ”

“ Grant that organisms in a state of nature vary, however slightly, one from another (which is indubitable) , and that such variations will be transmitted by a parent to its offspring (which no one then doubted) ; grant, further, that there is incessant strife among the various organisms, so that only a small proportion can come to maturity—grant these things, said Darwin, and we have an explanation of the preservation of variations which leads on to the transmutation of species themselves.
This wonderful coign of vantage Darwin had reached by 1839. Here was the full outline of his theory ”