n well and freshly described by the lamented Feuchtersleben,[1]
who died so young: how people cry out in their haste that nothing
is being done, while all the while great work is quietly growing to
maturity; and then, when it appears, it is not seen or heard in the
clamor, but goes its way silently, in modest grief:

"_Ist doch"--rufen sie vermessen--
Nichts im Werke, nichts gethan!"
Und das Grosse, reift indessen
Still heran_.

_Es ersheint nun: niemand sieht es,
Niemand hoert es im Geschrei
Mit bescheid'ner Trauer zieht es
Still vorbei_.

[Footnote 1: _Translator's Note_.--Ernst Freiherr von Feuchtersleben
(1806-49), an Austrian physician, philosopher, and poet, and a
specialist in medical psychology. The best known of his songs is that
beginning "_Es ist bestimmt in Gottes Rath_" to which Mendelssohn
composed one of his finest melodies.]

This lamentable death of the critical faculty is not less obvious in
the case of science, as is shown by the tenacious life of false and
disproved theories. If they are once accepted, they may go on bidding
defiance to truth for fifty or even a hundred years and more, as
stable as an iron pier in the midst of the waves. The Ptolemaic system
was still held a century after Copernicus had promulgated his theory.
Bacon, Descartes and Locke made their way extremely slowly and only
after a long time; as the reader may see by d'Alembert's celebrated
Preface to the _Encyclopedia_. Newton was not more successful; and
this is sufficiently proved by the bitterness and contempt with which
Leibnitz attacked his theory of gravitation in the controversy with
Clarke.[1] Although Newton lived for almost forty years after the
appearance of the _Principia_, his teaching was, when he died, only
to some extent accepted in his own country, whilst outside England he
counted scarcely twenty adherents; if we may believe the introductory
note to Voltaire's exposition of his theory. It was, indeed, chiefly
owing to this treatise of Voltaire's that the system became known in
France nearly twenty years after Newton's death. Until then a firm,
resolute, and patriotic stand was made by the Cartesian _Vortices_;
whilst only forty years previously, this same Cartesian philosophy had
been forbidden in the French schools; and now in turn d'Agnesseau, the
Chancellor, refused Voltaire the _Imprimatur_ for his treatise on the
Newtonian doctrine. On the other hand, in our day Newton's absurd
theor