One mark of this age is the sudden knowledge of the physical world. There is scarcely a department of science or art which is the same as it was fifty years ago. We have a new world full of wonderful inventions -- railways, telegraphs, and the like. We cannot help but take notice. And it comes with a new world of ideas, which affects us even though we cannot see them. A full estimate of these effects would require a great book, and I am sure I could not write it; but I think I may show how, using one or two great points, the new ideas are modifying two old sciences -- politics and political economy. Even upon these points my ideas must be incomplete, for the subject is novel; but, at any rate, I may suggest some conclusions, and so show what is requisite even if I do not supply it.
If we wanted to describe one of the most marked results, perhaps the most marked result, of late thought, we should say that by it everything is made "an antiquity." When, in former times our ancestors thought of an antiquarian, they described him as occupied with coins, and medals, and Druids' stones. These were then the characteristic records of the decipherable past, and it was with these that the decoders busied themselves. But now there are other relics; indeed, all matter is become such. Science tries to find in each bit of earth the record of the causes which made it precisely what it is; those forces have left their trace as much as the tact and hand of the artist left its mark on a classical gem. It would be tedious to reckon up the ingenious questionings by which geology has made part of the earth, at least, tell part of its tale; and the answers would have been meaningless if physiology and conchology and a hundred similar sciences had not brought their aid.
