"Black magic" with
its Satanic machinery vanished, only reappearing occasionally
among marvel-mongers and belated theologians. "White magic" became
legerdemain.

In the early years of the nineteenth century, physical research,
though it went on with ever-increasing vigour, felt in various ways the
reaction which followed the French Revolution. It was not merely under
the Bourbons and Hapsburgs that resistance was offered; even in
England the old spirit lingered long. As late as 1832, when the British
Association for the Advancement of Science first visited Oxford, no
less amiable a man than John Keble--at that time a power in the
university--condemned indignantly the conferring of honorary degrees
upon the leading men thus brought together. In a letter of that date to
Dr. Pusey he complained bitterly, to use his own words, that "the Oxford
doctors have truckled sadly to the spirit of the times in receiving the
hotchpotch of philosophers as they did." It is interesting to know that
among the men thus contemptuously characterized were Brewster, Faraday,
and Dalton.

Nor was this a mere isolated exhibition of feeling; it lasted many
years, and was especially shown on both sides of the Atlantic in all
higher institutions of learning where theology was dominant. Down to a
period within the memory of men still in active life, students in the
sciences, not only at Oxford and Cambridge but at Harvard and Yale, were
considered a doubtful if not a distinctly inferior class, intellectually
and socially--to be relegated to different instructors and buildings,
and to receive their degrees on a different occasion and with different
ceremonies from those appointed for students in literature. To the
State University of Michigan, among the greater American institutions of
learning which have never possessed or been possessed by a theological
seminary, belongs the honour of first breaking down this wall of
separation.

But from the middle years of the century chemical science progressed
with ever-accelerating force, and the work of Bunsen, Kirchhoff,
Dalton, and Faraday has, in the last years of the century, led up to
the establishment of Mendeleef's law, by which chemistry has become
predictive, as astronomy had become predictive by the calculations of
Newton, and biology by the discoveries of Darwin.

While one succession of strong men were thus developing chemistry out
of one form of magic, another succession were developing phy