Our Science has been built on the labours of scientific men in past
ages. New generalisations imagined by one thinker, new crucial
experiments devised by another, new instruments of observation invented
by another,--these have been the steps by which Science has grown and
established its authority and enlarged its dominion. When or by whom the
first steps were made we have no record. No mathematician that ever
lived showed greater natural power of intellect than he, whoever he was,
who first saw that the singular contained the universal; but we know
neither his name nor his age, nor his birthplace nor his race. But after
those first steps had been taken, we know who have been the leaders in
scientific advance. And we know what they have done, and what they are
doing; and we can conjecture the direction in which further advances
will be made. And so we can trace the development of this kind of
knowledge, and in a certain and very real sense this development may be
called an evolution.
But there is this difference between the evolution of nature and the
evolution of the science of nature. The evolution of nature results in
the existence of forms which did not exist before; the evolution of
knowledge results in the perception of laws which were already in
existence.
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