I speak of the science
which has no more direct bearing upon the affairs of our everyday life
than literature or music, painting or sculpture, poetry or history. A
hundred years ago the ordinary man of cultivation had to know
something of these last subjects; but the probabilities were rather
against his having any but the most superficial scientific knowledge.
At present all this has changed, thanks to the interest taken in
scientific discoveries, the large circulation of scientific books, and
the rapidity with which ideas originating among students of the most
advanced and abstruse sciences become, at least partially, domiciled
in the popular mind.
Another feature of the change, of the growth in the position of
science in the eyes of every one, and of the greatly increased respect
naturally resulting for scientific methods, has been a certain
tendency for scientific students to encroach on other fields. This is
particularly true of the field of historical study. Not only have
scientific men insisted upon the necessity of considering the history
of man, especially in its early stages, in connection with what
biology shows to be the history of life, but furthermore there has
arisen a demand that history shall itself be treated as a science.
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