The modifications of the external aspects of organic nature produced by man's interference / by George Rolleston.

  • Rolleston, George, 1829-1881.
Date:
1880
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The modifications of the external aspects of organic nature produced by man's interference / by George Rolleston. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    The amount of difference between those views and those of the statesman just mentioned, or those of ]\I. Pouyer-Quertier, or of another countryman of MM. Quesnay, Turgot, and Chevalier who is reported in the same ‘Times’ of Friday, May 2nd, no time liaving been lost in giving these valuable views to the world, to have averred that an increase in the imports denoted the impoverishment of a country; I must, as did Captain Lemuel Gulliver under somewhat similar circumstances in Laputa, ])rofess myself to be “ not skilful enough to com- prehend.” What is shown seems to me to be that in modern not less than in ancient times men will run their heads against the multiplication table, and that for the passing moment, at least, it is not always the heads which come off second best in the encounter. Of the second difference between the old world and the new which our command of methods and means, our recognition of the futility of attempting enterprises with a manus nuda and an intellect’us sibi permissus, has created, the gas, glass, and coal around us in this room speak, and I need not. As regards the third great point of contrast upon which Herr Helm insists, that of natural science, we are all probably at one with him. Our agreement may be illustrated by contrasting the different factors which two poets, each an artist capable of taking a wide view with due perspective and proportion of the sum of man’s activities, have in ancient and modern times respectively enumerated as making up that sum. When Juvenal specifies what he means by “ Quidquid agunt homines,” the comprehensive title of his satires, he enumerates nothing because, I suppose, he considered all else as beneath the dignity of a poet, but “ Votum, timor, ira, voluptas, Gaudia, discursus ”— large enough matters, but imponderables all of them. Contrast tliese items,—I purposely speak in Philistine phraseology—with those which our present Poet Laureate enumerates in e[)cxegesis of the “ inarch of mind ;” there we have the line : “ In the steamship, in the railway, in the tlioughts that shake mankind ” —ponderables and imponderables severally holding their due mutual proportion. And from this line I can pass in this [)lace by a natural and locally suggested transition to what I bidieve to be as large a difference between the ancient and modern world as either of the two last touched upon. The whole of the old world, of the orhis vetei’ibus notus, of irdaa rj olKovfxevrj,