t
one branch after another has sprung up, diverging more and more into the
realms of the unknown, until no one mind can hope to obtain even a
general knowledge of them all.

But this has not been the only tendency of scientific growth. Divergence
and differentiation had not proceeded far till the combining and
organizing movement began. The more individuality and complexity have
threatened to outreach the mental powers and become unmanageable, the
more have order and organization shown their ability to subordinate and
unitize the seeming diversity of elements. While the sciences continued
to increase in number and complexity, they began to overlap and
interlace, the principles of one running into the domain of another,
and even cooerdinating and binding together its seemingly incongruous
parts.

A simple scientific generalization is based on certain facts which,
taken in their collective capacity, mean the truth which is expressed in
the formula. A higher generalization embraces those which are simpler,
and unites by its expression the truths which they contain into the
formula of one great truth. This process goes on, rising constantly
higher and higher, the generalizations of the ascending series becoming
more comprehensive, and the convergence of all the diversified elements
into great general laws more striking and complete. Thus advances the
unitizing movement of science; and it is now progressing with a
steadiness and certainty unknown in former periods of research. Great
minds are at this moment occupied in the discovery and verification of
these great unitizing laws. Thus we perceive, that while science has
developed a bewildering mass of individual facts and minor principles,
it has also developed the germs of a unity which is destined to unfold
with a richness and magnificence of result heretofore unknown in the
annals of human inquiry.

As the special departments of science have testified, so also does the
general view of all science testify to this Law of Universal
Development.

But, what has all this to do with American Destiny? Very much, as may
yet appear. It is by the Past only that we can read the Future; and if
in history and in all development, there is revealed by the inductive
process a great general law, that law becomes the Oracle of Destiny.

A fitting transition from science to history would be ethnology, the
science of races, connected as it is with physics, chemistry, and
physiology, on