No one, he says, who has ever shot grouse or pheasants on the wing would
ever believe anything of the sort....'

Yet that boy lived to fly across the Atlantic and edit his father's
reminiscences.

Section 7

At the close of the nineteenth century as a multitude of passages in the
literature of that time witness, it was thought that the fact that man
had at last had successful and profitable dealings 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.' The spirit 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 preparing herself 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