es from that of Washington, all
preparatory to the longest and most brilliant reign in British annals.
Frederick II. was an old man, occupied with assuring to the power he
had created the position it now holds as the first in Europe. Clive,
in the House of Lords, was nursing a still younger bantling, now
an empire twice as populous as Europe was at that period. Under the
equally rugged hand of the young princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, Russia
was having her Mongolian epidermis indued with the varnish Napoleon
so signally failed to scrape off, and was for the first time taking a
place among the great powers of the West. The curtain, in short, was
in the act of rising on the Europe of to-day. Anson had lately brought
the Pacific to light, and Cook was completing his work. The crust of
Spanish monopoly in the trade of four-fifths of the North and South
American coasts had been broken, and England was preparing to replace
it, at some points, by her own. This was, of itself, a New World,
geographical and commercial.

Under Linnaeus and Buffon, another world, wider still, was unfolding
its wonders and subjecting them to a classification which has since
been but little changed, vast as have been the subsequent accessions
of knowledge and attainments in methods of interpretation. Before
them, the study of the organic creation can scarcely be said to have
existed. The inorganic was as little reduced to system, and in its
broadest aspect was not even looked at. Buffon's acute but for the
most part empiric speculations on the structure of the globe were a
step in advance; but the science of geology he did not recognize, and
left to be shaped a very little later by Hutton. Priestley, Cavendish
and Lavoisier were dissecting the impalpable air and making the
gaseous form of substances as familiar and manageable as the solid.
Hence true analytic chemistry. Astronomy, an older science, had
derived new precision from the first observed transit of Venus,
imperfect as were the data obtained and the calculations made.

Contemporaneous with this sudden apparition of new fields of
scientific discovery and enlargement of the old was an intellectual
movement of a more general character than that necessarily involved
in the progress of natural philosophy. The French Encyclopaedists took
hold of social, moral and juridical questions with an unsparing vigor
that could not be gainsaid. The art of criticism was simultaneously
introduced, perfected and