" Modern " is thus a word we are compelled to use in contradistinction to a period removed from us by four or five generations. The pioneers of research who flourished in the first half of the three centuries or less we are considering seem to us the ancients. They were the discoverers or the first superficial explorers of new lands which others have occupied and developed. Many of the latter, indeed, so quickly and continuously has their work been buried beneath that of later improvers, have in turn fallen back into aiitiquity. Chemistry, for instance, has a new nomencla ture, a new system, and new bases, besides having its relations and scope extended beyond the wildest dreams of its founders. The water we drink, the food we eat, the soil that yields it, the fuel we burn, the air we breathe, and the teguments composing our mortal frame are analyzed with a pre cision and formulated in terms that would have been incomprehensible one-third of three centuries ago.
Not merely do expansion and correlation pertain to the sciences, but multiplication as well. They grow out of each other, like the polyp, by gemination. Before Buffon, a short century ago, there had been no histor ian of animal nature since the fictions of Pliny. Buffon compressed the whole story of the earth and its inhabitants into a few volumes, largely of rhetoric, and then folded his arms across his laced and gilded vest with the satisfaction of having exhausted the theme. The subject is now parcelled out among many sciences, each subdivided into special ties, and none claiming to have passed the elementary stage. Geology has exhumed or begun to exhume a buried world more instructive than Pompeii, and summons to its study, for an indispensable revision of their former conclusions, the astronomer, the naturalist, and all their associates. The tree of knowledge grows before our eyes. We have not mastered one of its twigs. Yet we have plucked fruit from them all in increased comfort, health, means of enjoyment, intellectual and social resources, and physical and—speaking of the race in mass—mental vital ity. Learning, no longer concealed in mystic phrases and an unknown tongue, has become practical. It visits the dwellings of town and country, accompanies the mariner round the globe, and places him at every haven within a few minutes' speech of his home. Physical science, not assuming to overpass the frontier of matter, has yet extended that domain so far as to trace and control forces which were formerly con sidered abstract. With the aid of statistics it is gradually formulating such apparently transcendental tendencies as those to crime, suicide, and insanity, preparatory, we may hope, to the contrivance of some method of checking them. This hope is justifiable, for it is not easy to concede that these tendencies are aggravated by civilization, in view of the estab lished fact that it has increased the stature, strength, and longevity of man, while it has by education given his intellect the means of protect ing itself against eccentricities born of ignorance, and through the advance ment of law supplied a better regulation of his passions. If a sound body
implies a sound mind, the advances made in medicine and hygiene which have so notably aided the one cannot have failed to promote the other, were there no other perceptible means to that end, and were the increased strain upon the mental faculties even greater than can be properly traced to the demands of civilization.
Among the new sciences which least belong to physics may be named one which ranks high among the adjuncts of culture, and which can hardly be dated farther back than a century and a half, although it claims the ancient and comprehensive name of music. Cultivated in competition by the Teutonic and Romance races, it has come to the front for education and intellectual recreation everywhere, in the home and the theatre. It has almost elbowed out the old drama, and the playhouse has become, as frequently as otherwise, the academy of music, the opera house, or the conservatory. The beer-drinkers of Teniers and Hans Sachs have developed into connoisseurs of music. The devotee of Liszt, Mendelssohn, and Rossini can no longer be a boor.
Musicians style themselves artists. They are supported in this claim by the correlation among the fine arts. The cultivation of music implies, generally, the prevalence of the artistic sense. It would be unsafe, however, to infer from the progress made in music a like advance in painting and sculpture. Our highest attainments in those departments fall short of the glories of the Renaissance. Still, both of them have been popularized to an extent unknown to that period. The masterpieces of the chisel and the pencil have been reproduced and made familiar to all. This training of the eye and the taste has caused the production of innumerable pictures, engravings, and works in marble and bronze possessed of greater merit and truth to reality than the average work of three centuries ago. The same may be said of objects in clay and glass. We have no Luca della Robbia or Palissy, but fair copies of their best pieces are at the command of every one, and many thousands of house holds have in daily sight—and, what is more, in daily use—articles of this class superior in elegance and delicacy of shape and texture to any thing with which the contemporaries of those artists were familiar. Here is a constant and all-pervading source of refinement which certainly amounts to progress in art and its highest uses.