with the steam that scalded him and the electricity that flashed

and banged about the sky at him, was an amazing and perhaps a

culminating exercise of his intelligence and his intellectual

courage. The air of 'Nunc Dimittis' sounds in same of these

writings. 'The great things are discovered,' wrote Gerald Brown

in his summary of the nineteenth century. 'For us there remains

little but the working out of detail.' Thespirit of the seeker

was still rare in the world; education was unskilled,

unstimulating, scholarly, and but little valued, and few people

even then could have realised that Science was still but the

flimsiest of trial sketches and discovery scarcely beginning. No

one seems to have been afraid of science and its possibilities.

Yet now where there had been but a score or so of seekers, there

were many thousands, and for one needle of speculation that had

been probing the curtain of appearances in 1800, there were now

hundreds. And already Chemistry, which had been content with her

atoms and molecules for the better part of a century, was

preparingherself for that vast next stride that was to

revolutionise the whole life of man from top to bottom.

One realises how crude was the science of that time when one

considers the case of the composition of air. This was

determined by that strange genius and recluse, that man of

mystery, that disembowelled intelligence, Henry Cavendish,

towards the end of the eighteenth century. So far as he was

concerned the work was admirably done. He separated all theknown

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