Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews

As regards education, for example. Granting the alleged defects of women, is it not somewhat absurd to sanction and maintain a system of education which would seem to have been...

A workman has to bear hard labour, and perhaps privation, while he sees others rolling in wealth, and feeding their dogs with what would keep his children from starvation. Would...

The accusation that we have been running counter to the _principles_ of natural philosophy, therefore, is devoid of foundation. The only question which can arise is whether we h...

[66] Space will not allow us to give Professor Kölliker's arguments in detail; our readers will find a full and accurate version of them in the _Reader_ for August 13th and 20th...

"In proportion as these spirits [the animal spirits] enter the cavities of the brain, they pass thence into the pores of its substance, and from these pores into the nerves; whe...

The foundation of all this calculation is, of course, a knowledge of the length of time the _Crania_ and the coralline needed to attain their full size; and, on this head, preci...

But spinning jenny and steam pump are, after all, but toys, possessing an accidental value; and natural knowledge creates multitudes of more subtle contrivances, the praises of...

The student who repairs to them sees in the list of classes and of professors a fair picture of the world of knowledge. Whatever he needs to know there is some one ready to teac...

After this preliminary opening of the eyes to the great spectacle of the daily progress of Nature, as the reasoning faculties of the child grow, and he becomes familiar with the...

Let us try another method of making the chalk tell us its own history. To the unassisted eye chalk looks simply like a very loose and open kind of stone. But it is possible to g...

would have been a whit roused from its apathy, by the information that the primrose is a Dicotyledonous Exogen, with a monopetalous corolla and central placentation. But I advoc...

In perfect strictness, it is true that chemical investigation can tell us little or nothing, directly, of the composition of living matter, inasmuch as such matter must needs di...

And if I had followed out all these various lines of classification fully, I should discover in the end that there was no animal, either recent or fossil, which did not at once...

But I absolutely deny the existence of this conformity. If there is one thing clear about the progress of modern science, it is the tendency to reduce all scientific problems, e...

So far as I can arrive at any clear comprehension of the matter, Science is not, as many would seem to suppose, a modification of the black art, suited to the tastes of the nine...

As a question of dialectics, it must be admitted that this sort of reasoning is not very formidable to those who are not to be frightened by consequences. It is an _argumentum a...

But other influences were at work upon Hutton beside those of a mind logical by Nature, and scientific by sound training; and the peculiar turn which his speculations took seems...

A boy is taught to read his own and other languages, in order that he may have access to infinitely wider stores of knowledge than could ever be opened to him by oral intercours...

But this is not all. Allied with geology, palæontology has established two laws of inestimable importance: the first, that one and the same area of the earth's surface has been...

There is no fault to be found with Mr. Darwin's method, then; but it is another question whether he has fulfilled all the conditions imposed by that method. Is it satisfactorily...

Thus while it may be doubted if, for some years, any one is likely to be competent to pronounce judgment on all the issues raised by Mr. Darwin, there is assuredly abundant room...

If (as is hardly conceivable) the new variety is so perfectly adapted to the conditions that no improvement upon it is possible,--it will persist, because, though it does not ce...

But a race, once produced, is no more a fixed and immutable entity than the stock whence it sprang; variations arise among its members, and as these variations are transmitted l...

I should have liked to provide this collection of "Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews," with a Dedication and a Preface. In the former, I should have asked you to allow me to a...

Some years ago one of your Secretaries pointed out another kind of positive palæontological evidence tending towards the same conclusion--afforded by the existence of what he te...

I have endeavoured, in the first part of this discourse, to give you a conception of the direction towards which modern physiology is tending; and I ask you, what is the differe...

I. No one who possesses even a superficial acquaintance with physical science can read Comte's "Leçons" without becoming aware that he was at once singularly devoid of real know...

[73] Descartes pretends that he does not apply his views to the human body, but only to an imaginary machine which, if it could be constructed, would do all that the human body...