The Victorian age introduced anaesthetics and antiseptic surgery, developed photography, the sciences of chemistry and physics, of biology and zooelogy, of botany and geology.  The enthusiastic scientific worker appeared in every field, endeavoring to understand the laws of nature and to apply them in the service of man.  Science also turned its attention to human progress and welfare.  The new science of sociology had earnest students.

[Illustration:  CHARLES DARWIN.]

The Influence of Science on Literature.—­The Victorian age was the first to set forth clearly the evolution hypothesis, which teaches the orderly development from simple to complex forms.  While the idea of evolution had suggested itself to many naturalists, Charles Darwin (1809-1882) was the first to gain a wide hearing for the theory.  After years of careful study of nature, he published in 1859 The Origin of Species by Natural Selection, an epoch-making work, which had a far-reaching effect on the thought of the age.

The influence of his doctrine of evolution is especially apparent in Tennyson’s poetry, in George Eliot’s fiction, in religious thought, and in the change in viewing social problems.  In his Synthetic Philosophy, Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), philosopher and metaphysician, applied the doctrine of evolution not only to plants and animals but also to society, morality, and religion.

Two eminent scientists, John Tyndall (1820-1893) and Thomas Huxley (1825-1895), did much to popularize science and to cause the age to seek a broader education.  Tyndall’s Fragments of Science (1871) contains a fine lecture on the Scientific Use of the Imagination, in which he becomes almost poetic in his imaginative conception of evolution:—­

“Not alone the more ignoble forms of animalcular or animal life, not alone the nobler forms of the horse and lion, not alone the exquisite and wonderful mechanism of the human body, but the human mind itself,—­emotion, intellect, will, and all their phenomena,—­were once latent in a fiery cloud...  All our philosophy, all our poetry, all our science, and all our art,—­Plato, Shakespeare, Newton, and Raphael,—­are potential in the fires of the sun.”

[Illustration:  JOHN TYNDALL.]

Unlike Keats in his Lamia, Tyndall is firm in his belief that science will not clip the wings of imagination.  In the same lecture he says:—­

“How are we to lay hold of the physical basis of light, since, like that of life itself, it lies entirely without the domain of the senses?  We are gifted with the power of imagination and by this power we can lighten the darkness which surrounds the world of the senses...  Bounded and conditioned by cooeperant reason, imagination becomes the mightiest instrument of the physical discoverer.  Newton’s passage from a falling apple to a falling moon was at the outset a leap of the imagination.”