Age of Discovery

“ Many investigators, noted for learning and persevering research, have laboured to clear this away; yet, with every new effort, the only result seems to be a further recession of the date of its birth. The probability of reliable discovery has vanished and nought seems left but to relegate it, as one painstaking inquirer has suggested, to prehistoric times. ”

“ In the course of my research anomalies have sprung up in every direction. I have felt like a traveler, navigating some mighty river in an unexplored continent. I have seen to the right and the left other channels opening out, all claiming investigation, and promising rich rewards of discovery for the explorer who shall trace them to their source. Time has not allowed me to undertake the whole of a task so vast and so manifold. ”

“ Much is Still to be Discovered.
“To many,” says Sir Michael Foster, Professor of Physiology at Cambridge, “scientific knowledge seems to be advancing by leaps and bounds; every day brings its fresh discovery, opening up strange views, turning old ideas upside down. ”

“ With the opening and progress of the nineteenth century came other conditions of prime importance. Invention, which first became active near the end of the preceding century, now flourished until its results seemed rather the work of magic than of plain human thought and work. Science, which already had made some notable triumphs, gained an undreamed-of activity and hundreds of the deep secrets of the universe were unfolded. Discovery and exploration achieved surprising results. At the beginning of the century half the world was unknown. ”

“ This pregnant fact has excited little notice hitherto; but when the scientific history of the first half of the nineteenth century shall come to be reviewed by those who succeed us, and reap the fruits of such advancement as we now aim at, it will not be overlooked as an evidence of the exoteric character of much of the overestimated science of the age. ”

“ It may possibly be true that, in some of those fields of discovery which lie open to such rough observations as can be made without artificial methods, the great explorers of former times have appropriated most of what is valuable, and that the gleanings which remain are sought after rather for their abstruseness than for their intrinsic worth. ”

“ At all events, whether the force can or cannot be harnessed to do the daily work of the world, the discovery is one that will mark an epoch in the progress of science and give the inventor and his patrons a meed of immortality. ”

“ Invention is the making of some new thing not previously existing. Discovery is the finding of something already in existence but not known before. There was no electric telegraph until Samuel Morse made or invented it; America has always existed, but was not known until Christopher Columbus found or discovered it.
Among all the builders of civilization, not the least are the inventors and discoverers. ”

“ Greater knowledge of all the world’s peoples has provided the means for solidly based comparative studies, and the developing techniques of archaeology have brought more factual evidence to hand. Gradually the true picture is taking shape as each new discovery is analyzed and discussed and takes its place in the total structure. ”

“ FINDS, a term recently applied by English archæologists to deposits of objects connected with human life, and sometimes associated with human remains, but of prehistoric or unknown origin. The chief aim of scientific research in regard to them is to ascertain the historical relation and condition of the human beings which they represent. As the development of civilization is not a uniform process, the discovery of a few objects made and used by a prehistoric tribe is not a sufficient index to the exact place of that tribe in history. ”

“ Likewise, we shall say that a naturalist has made a discovery if he has found a hitherto unknown plant, animal, or stone.
But if someone builds a harvester, a clock, a sewing machine – if he obtains paints from coal, if he makes a steel different from that which exists today – then this person makes an invention, that is, makes a thing previously unknown, which nature itself could not make and maintain.
History, the study of what has happened among people in the past, teaches us that discoveries and inventions have not sprung into existence full-blown, but have appeared gradually. ”

“ The first consequence of this is that we become able to make the largest and most general comparison of human conditions which has ever been possible to humanity, nor does this [Pg 25] ability regard the present alone. The unveiling of the treasures of the past, the interpretation of its experience and doctrine which we owe to the scholar and archæologist, enable us to compare remote antiquity with the things of the last minute. The work of antiquarian science culminates in the discovery of the prehistoric man. ”

“ In discovery we search for new phenomena, their causes and relations; in invention we seek to produce new effects, or to produce known effects in an improved manner. The objects of the scientific discoverer are, new truth and greater accuracy; whereas those of the inventor, are increased usefulness and economy of results. The ancients classed inventors with the gods, because they considered them great benefactors to the human race. Discoverers may properly be viewed as priests and prophets of truth, because they both reveal new knowledge to mankind, and predict with certainty coming events. ”

“ In the light of a new discovery, we are apt to wonder why our fathers were so blind as not to see it. When a new invention has been made, we ask ourselves, Why was it not thought of before? The discovery seems obvious, and the invention simple, after we know them. ”

“ We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck; ”

“ But it seems equally extraordinary, that even the only two expeditions which within our time have added largely to our knowledge, alike should have neglected the most obvious and almost the only useful means of discovery. ”

“ Borne on the advancing crest of the wave of discovery, industry will hold right on.
If we are to understand something of the degree in which, as the century proceeds, science will have enlarged its knowledge of matter, we have only to glance backward to its views of matter at the close of the eighteenth century, and compare them with the views which it entertains now. ”

“ A great principle, like that which we are about to explain to the reader, is too vast in its bearings for its discovery and elaboration to have been the work of an individual. This truth, and indeed the whole of our knowledge, is but the result of the development and growth of pre-existing knowledge. In fact, every discovery, however brilliant—every invention, however ingenious, is but the expansion or improvement of an antecedent discovery or invention. ”

“ And—to seek an illustration at the other end of the scale—we know that the advanced thinkers of Greece and Rome believed in the antiquity of the earth and in the evolution of man two thousand years before the coming of Darwin. We have but partly solved the mysteries of the progress of civilization, then, when we have pointed out that each tangible stage of progress owed its initiative to a new invention or discovery of science. To go to the root of the matter we must needs explain how it came about that a given generation of men was in mental mood to receive the new invention or discovery. ”

“ Those new and improved instruments and processes provide science with the means of extending its researches into other fields of discovery; and thus, as every truth revealed, supplies inventive genius with fresh matter to mould into new forms, those creations become in their turn agents in promoting further discoveries. ”

“ And a countless number of investigators are persistently and confidently enlarging, amplifying, correcting, and pushing farther and farther back the boundaries of this greater past—this prehuman past—that the scientific criticism of existing phenomena has discovered and restored and brought for the first time into the world of human thought. We have become possessed of a new and once unsuspected history of the world—of which all the history that was known, for example, to Dr. ”

“ And in time, as well as space, has science enormously multiplied the numbers. Where the Bible chronology gave sixty centuries for the world's age, science demands as many millenniums. Where Genesis granted six days for the business of creation, geology requires as many æons. ”

“ But we are living in an age of scientific investigation; scientific methods are being applied to every branch of study; history has had to be rewritten for us in the new light which is being thrown upon the path of human development. This is not the place to set forth in detail the steps by which knowledge has been slowly but surely reached, regarding the history of the once mysterious mounds. ”

“ They arise from the number and variety of the facts, from the uncertainties attending many important points, from the new views constantly opening up in the progress of discovery, and from the difficulty of presenting in an intelligible form the preliminary data in biology and geology necessary for the understanding of the questions in hand. In order, as far as possible, to obviate these difficulties, the plan adopted in this work has been to note the first known appearance of each leading type of life, and to follow its progress down to the present time or until it became extinct. ”

“ It is simply due to a new and more critical way of looking at things. Our knowledge of the geological past, clear and definite as it has become, is of a different and lower order than the knowledge of our memory, and yet of a quite practicable and trustworthy order—a knowledge good enough to go upon; and if one were to speak of the private memory as the personal past, of the next wider area of knowledge as the traditional or historical past, then one might call all that great and inspiring background [31] of remoter geological time the inductive past. ”

“ Inventions and discoveries do not precede or follow each other in order. The instrument may be [Pg 2] made before the laws which govern its operation are discovered. The discovery may long precede its adaptation in physical form, and both the discovery and adaptation may occur together. ”

“ There will always be a difference of opinion as to the comparative value of a new discovery and a new invention, and the difference between these terms should be clearly apprehended. While they are to a certain extent interchangeable, the word "discovery" in science is usually applied to the first enunciation of some property of nature till then unrecognized; "invention," on the other hand, is the application of this property to the uses of mankind. ”

“ We may work simply for the love of discovery, that is the exercise of the investigative instinct and the pleasure of overcoming difficulties; or we may work with the beneficent idea of increasing the sum of human knowledge, or of unravelling the string which forms the clue to the history of human progress, or of making such generalisations as may constitute the laws of a new historic science. ”

“ There is a pretence of supplying that new kind of history, which the new method of discovery and invention requires as the first step towards its conclusions, which is put down as the THIRD PART of the Instauration, though the natural history which is produced for that purpose is very far from fulfilling the description and promise of that division. ”

“ If, as above seen, the study of human origins is largely a geological problem, the investigation of the later developments, during the Metal Ages and prehistoric times, belongs mainly to the field of Archaeology. ”

“ Geology was but just beginning to make good its claim to a place among the sciences. This unfolded to man the physical history of the world as read from the rocks, and deals with times so vast and profound that we speak no longer of years, but of ages. And with the aid of Geology grand secrets were wrung from the past, and new light was thrown on the manners and customs of primitive man. Thus the foundation for still another science was laid, called Archæology, or the science of Human Antiquities. ”

“ Indeed, the whole history of scientific discovery is the history of a chain whose links have been forged by different men, and fitted at different times. If such be the most fortunate mode of scientific discovery, how much do we increase the importance of the study of the ancient literature, when we come to reflect that the termination of their scientific labors during the night of the middle ages, is the point of departure from which all modern scientific discovery has emanated. ”

“ For it appears at first incredible that any such discovery should be made, and when it has been made, it appears incredible that it should so long have escaped men’s research. All which affords good reason for the hope that a vast mass of inventions yet remains, which may be deduced not only from the investigation of new modes of operation, but also from transferring, comparing, and applying these already known, by the method of what we have termed literate experience. ”

“ As, however, the truths of geology became gradually formulated into a science, and men's minds got accustomed to apply the new methods of research to the elucidation of the origin and history of the human race, the sphere of prehistoric archæology became equally well defined. ”

“ Archaeology—digging up the ancient past—is a fairly young science. It is not so young, of course, as electronics or aerodynamics or radiology. It is not so old as astronomy or mathematics or metallurgy. ”