Abstract
MEN will have forgotten much when the second half of this nineteenth century is no longer remembered. Whatever may have been its faults, it has no rival in the past history of the world as an epoch of scientific progress. This progress has been largely due to the felicitous co-operation of the mind of the student with the skill of the craftsman in the more perfect construction of instruments of research. By them darkness has been made visible; the opaque, translucent; the unseen, conspicuous; the inert, sensitive; silence, vocal. A thousand methods of experiment, tests of the most delicate nature, have been devised, so that vague conjecture has been replaced by exact knowledge, and hypothesis by demonstration. In such an epoch it may seem a little fanciful to select any one term of years as exceptionally fruitful; but it is remarkable that in the first decade of this half-century, science was enriched by three contributions, each of which has led to consequences of far-reaching import. In 1858 Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace announced simultaneously the conclusions as to the origin of species at which they had independently arrived, and the well-known book by the former author appeared in the following year. They thus formulated the results of protracted investigations and patient experiments with the simpler appliances of earlier days. They subjected, more strictly than ever before, the facts of nature to an inductive treatment, and thus lent a new impulse to biological science. Their hypothesis gave a definite aim to the researches of students, and kindled an unquenchable flame of intellectual activity. In 1860, Bunsen and Kirchoff announced the results of applying the spectroscope to problems in chemical analysis. By means of this instrument not only have investigations attained a precision hitherto impossible, but also the student, no longer cribbed, cabined, and confined, to the limits of the earth, can question the stars in their courses, and bid nebulae and comets reveal the secrets of their history. Lastly—though the problem be in a humbler sphere, dealing with neither the immensities of stellar physics nor the mystery of life-Henry Clifton Sorby, in 1856, described the results of microscopic investigations into the structures of minerals and rocks. Strictly speaking, indeed, the method was not wholly novel. So long since as 1827, William Nicol, of Edinburgh, had contrived to make sections of fossil wood sufficiently thin for examination under the microscope; but the device, so far as I know, had not been generally applied, or its wide possibilities apprehended.
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The Microscope's Contributions to the Earth's Physical History1. Nature 46, 180–184 (1892). https://doi.org/10.1038/046180b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/046180b0