minated by the names of Pope,
Shaftesbury, Swift, Arbuthnot, Defoe, Steele, Addison, and Berkeley. It
is pleasant to compare these three magnificently flowering epochs, but
not profitable if we attempt to weigh one against the other. They are
comparable only in the splendour of their accomplishment.

It is more difficult to fit science into our scheme of the Victorian Age
than to find places there for Art and Literature. Perhaps the reason of
this is that the latter were national in their character, whereas
scientific inquiry, throughout the nineteenth century, was carried on
upon international lines, or, at least, in a spirit unprecedentedly
non-provincial. The vast achievements of science, practical and
theoretical, were produced for the world, not for a race. Mr. Asquith
speaks with justice and eloquence of the appearance of Darwin's _Origin
of Species_ which he distinguishes as being "if not actually the most
important, certainly the most interesting event of the Age," and his
remarks on the fortune of that book are excellent. No one can
over-estimate the value of what we owe to Darwin. But perhaps a
Frenchman might speak in almost the same terms of Claude Bernard, whose
life and work ran parallel with Darwin's. If the _Origin of Species_
made an epoch in 1859, the _Introduction a la medicine experimental_
made another in 1865. Both these books, as channels by which the
experimental labours of each investigator reached the prepared and
instructed public, exercised at once, and have continued ever since to
exercise, an enormous effect on thought as well as on knowledge. They
transformed the methods by which man approaches scientific
investigation, and while they instructed they stimulated a new ardour
for instruction. In each case the value of the discovery lay in the
value of the idea which led to the discovery, and, as some one has said
in the case of Claude Bernard, they combined for the first time the
operations of science and philosophy. The parallel between these two
contemporaries extends, in a measure, to their disciples and successors,
and seems to suggest that Mr. Asquith in his generous and difficult
estimate may have exaggerated the purely Victorian element in the
science of the age of Darwin. This only accentuates the difficulty, and
he may perhaps retort that there is an extreme danger in suggesting what
does and what does not form a part of so huge a system.

Justifiably Mr. Asquith takes it for grant