of emigrants thither. New Zealand was
incorporated in New South Wales. The wild financial speculations engendered
by these changes plunged almost all of Australia into bankruptcy. In Cape
Colony the public school system was introduced by Sir W. Herschel.

[Sidenote: Industrial development]

[Sidenote: Charles Darwin]

In England, it was a period of material advances in civilization. Postal
reforms were introduced by Sir Roland Hill. In July, a bill for penny
postage was introduced in Parliament, resulting in a new postage law
providing a uniform rate of fourpence per letter. New speed records were
made on land and on water. While the steam packet "Britannia" crossed from
Halifax to Liverpool in ten days, the locomotive "North Star" accomplished
a run of thirty-seven miles in one hour. Wheatstone perfected his invention
of a telegraph clock. A patent was obtained for the process of obtaining
water gas. Charles Darwin, having returned from his scientific travels on
H.M.S. "Beagle," published his "Journal of Researches."

[Sidenote: Death of Schelling]

[Sidenote: Agassiz]

A loss to German philosophic literature was the death of Joseph Schelling,
whose theories formed the main inspiration of the romantic poet Novalis.
Agassiz, the naturalist, published his original researches on fresh-water
fishes.

[Sidenote: Schwann's cell theory]

[Sidenote: Liebig's theory of fermentation]

It was then that Dr. Theodore Schwann, stimulated in his microscopic
researches by the previous discoveries of Robert Brown, Johannes Mueller
and Schleiden, propounded the famous cell theory in his work, "Microscopic
Researches Concerning the Unity in the Structure and Growth of Animals and
Plants." Schwann's book became a scientific classic almost from the moment
of its publication. It was Schwann, too, who, simultaneously with Cagniard
la Tour, discovered the active principle of gastric juice to be the
substance which he named pepsin. The cell theory was for some time combated
by the most eminent German men of science. Thus Liebig, in apparent
agreement with Helmholtz, took a firm stand against the new doctrine with
his famous "theory of fermentation" promulgated this same year.

[Sidenote: Death of William Smith]

[Sidenote: The new geology]

In England, William Smith, "the father of English geology," died. Born in
1769, Smith, like many another English scientist, was self-taught and
perhaps all the more independent for that. He d