naturally developed society is a second corollary from the same law. Of profound significance for the sociologist, however, is the fact that to-day we are rapidly passing from such natural organization to a new and highly artificial one. Problems of city life confront us on every side. They are not devoid of ethnic importance; investigation is concentrating upon them. In the final paper of our series we shall proceed to their consideration.
| SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS IN THE CLOSING CENTURY.[1] |
By Prof. LUDWIG BÜCHNER.
CENTURY of enlightenment—century of science—century of reconciliation—as such respectively may be characterized the eighteenth, the nineteenth, and the twentieth centuries; though in so characterizing the last we have somewhat forestalled time. But the designation of the present century as that of science can hardly be disputed; for progress in human knowledge and in consequent power has been so great and far-reaching in this century, and so rapid within the last few years, that in this respect no preceding century can at all compare with this.
Astronomy.—It is known that Copernicus, fearing clerical persecution, was compelled to hold back his great work on the revolutions of the heavenly bodies for thirty years, and that when finally published it was condemned and prohibited as heretical. The telescope also was put under the ban, because, according to the view of the Church, it permitted men to see farther than God by the of the human eye intended them to see. Nevertheless, it was the telescope that put a definite end to the narrow notions arising from the geocentric error, and ousted the earth and its inhabitants from their imagined high place as center of the universe. But the crowning of the astronomical edifice founded on these discoveries occurred only in the century at whose exit we are standing, and this through the founding of the important science of astrophysics and the knowledge acquired thereby of the chemical and physical constitution of the heavenly bodies by which we are surrounded. These researches were initiated by the wonderful discovery made in 1859 by Kirchhoff and Bunsen of the spectral analysis or the language of light, which has furnished special elucidation of the chemico-physical constitution of the sun, which elucidation must have appeared impossible to previous science. Spectrum
- ↑ From Prof. Ludwig Büchner's book, Am Todtenbett des Jahrhunderts, which is about to be published in Germany.
