Wissenschaft, particularly in that development of it known to us as positive science, the case stands far otherwise. Yet, even here, the unification of knowledge, each nation contributing its quota to the common fund, happens to be perhaps the achievement of the nineteenth century. Organization by countries, especially in the case of France, there was between the Renascence and the French Revolution; but a worldwide pact, embracing all effort, no matter where, did not eventuate then. Now, it is of prime moment for the present subject that the instruments of this recent unification have been the German university system, and the academies and institutes of France. By contrast, the English-speaking world possessed no such developed organs, if we except the Scottish universities where, naturally enough, Dalton met immediate recognition. Thus English science till but yesterday—teste even Darwin—has betrayed individualistic tendencies. These were never more evident than in Dalton's career, and during his life, moreover.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Cuvier, in his "Rapport" of 1808, is extolling—and justly—the preeminence of France in the exact sciences, an extraordinary contract manifests itself across the Channel. In the same year, John Playfair bewails the "incontrovertible proofs of the inferiority of the English mathematicians," and refers to "the public institutions of England" as its cause.[1] Eight years later, in a damnatory notice of Dealtry's "Principles of Fluxions," another writer notes it for a paradox that, Newton dead, his country "should, for the last seventy or eighty years, have been inferior to so many of its neighbours."[2] Once more, in the same review for 1822, a third critic deplores the state of affairs at Cambridge, where "for want of facilities" men "are apt to lose the spirit of investigation." Brewster's article in the Quarterly Review[3] which, as is well known, led to the foundation of the British Association, is no less sarcastic and outspoken. These attacks were directed against the English universities:[4] that of Babbage, the peg on which Brewster hung his exordium, had the Royal Society for its mark.[5] Now the extraordi-
- ↑ Cf. Edinburgh Review, No. XXII., January, 1808, pp. 249 f. A review of La Place's "Traité de Mécanique Celeste."
- ↑ Ibid., No. LIII, September, 1816, pp. 87 f. (Dealtry was a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a fellow of the Royal Society.) Dalton himself made the same complaint in his lectures at the London Royal Institution (1810); cf. "A New View of the Origin of Dalton's Atomic Theory," Roscoe and Harden, p. 105.
- ↑ Vol. XLIII. (1830), pp. 305 f.
- ↑ "Analogous circumstances produce analogous protests even now—e. g., "Oxford at the Cross Roads," Professor Percy Gardner (1905).
- ↑ "Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, and on some of its Causes," by Charles Babbage, Lucasian professor of mathematics in the University of Cambridge (1830).
