read our future, but it does a great deal to brighten our present.
Laboring to supply the wants and enhance the pleasures and security
of daily life, it makes excursions with a sure foot in the opposite
direction of abstruse problems in natural philosophy. It analyzes all
substances, determines their relations, and tries to guide the artisan
in utilizing its acquisitions for the general good. To enumerate
these, or to give the merest sketch of chemical progress within the
century, would fill many pages. It has enriched and invigorated all
the arts by supplying new material and new processes. Illuminating
gas, photography, the anæsthetics, the artificial fertilizers,
quinine, etc. are a few of its more familiarly known contributions.
It has aided medical jurisprudence, and so far checked crime. Besides
enlarging the pharmacopoeia, it has promoted sanitary reform in many
ways, notably by ascertaining the media of contagion in disease and
providing for their detection and removal. Its triumphs are so closely
interwoven with the appliances of common life that we are prone to
lose sight of them. From the aniline dye that beautifies a picture or
a dress, to the explosive that lifts a reef or mines the Alps for a
highway, the gradations are infinite and multiform.

Heavy as is the draft of the material sciences upon the thought
and energy of the century, it has not monopolized them. No trifling
resources have been left for mere abstract investigation. If
meta-physics stands, despite the labors of Stewart, Hamilton, Hegel,
Comte, very much where it did when Socrates ran amuck among the
casuistical Quixotes of his day, and left the philosophic tilters of
Greece, the knights-errant in search of the supreme good, in the same
plight with the chivalry of Spain after Cervantes, the science of
mind, and particularly mental pathology, has made some steps forward
on crutches furnished by the medical profession. The treatment of