IN FIVE VOLUMES - VOLUME III.

MODERN DEVELOPMENT OF THE
PHYSICAL SCIENCES

A HISTORY OF SCIENCE

BOOK III

MODERN DEVELOPMENT OF THE PHYSICAL
SCIENCES

With the present book we enter the field of the
distinctively modern. There is no precise date
at which we take up each of the successive stories,
but the main sweep of development has to do in each
case with the nineteenth century. We shall see at
once that this is a time both of rapid progress and of
great differentiation. We have heard almost nothing
hitherto of such sciences as paleontology, geology, and
meteorology, each of which now demands full attention.
Meantime, astronomy and what the workers of the
elder day called natural philosophy become wonderfully
diversified and present numerous phases that
would have been startling enough to the star-gazers
and philosophers of the earlier epoch.