The intellectual influence of science.—­It changed the mode and the direction of thought in Europe.—­The transactions of the Royal Society of London, and other scientific societies, furnish an illustration of this.

The economical influence of science is illustrated by the numerous mechanical and physical inventions, made since the fourteenth century.—­Their influence on health and domestic life, on the arts of peace and of war.

Answer to the question, What has Science done for humanity?

Europe, at the epoch of the Reformation, furnishes us with the result of the influences of Roman Christianity in the promotion of civilization.  America, examined in like manner at the present time, furnishes us with an illustration of the influences of science.

Science and civilization.  In the course of the seventeenth century a sparse European population bad settled along the western Atlantic coast.  Attracted by the cod-fishery of Newfoundland, the French had a little colony north of the St. Lawrence; the English, Dutch, and Swedes, occupied the shore of New England and the Middle States; some Huguenots were living in the Carolinas.  Rumors of a spring that could confer perpetual youth—­a fountain of life—­had brought a few Spaniards into Florida.  Behind the fringe of villages which these adventurers had built, lay a vast and unknown country, inhabited by wandering Indians, whose numbers from the Gulf of Mexico to the St. Lawrence did not exceed one hundred and eighty thousand.  From them the European strangers had learned that in those solitary regions there were fresh-water seas, and a great river which they called the Mississippi.  Some said that it flowed through Virginia into the Atlantic, some that it passed through Florida, some that it emptied into the Pacific, and some that it reached the Gulf of Mexico.  Parted from their native countries by the stormy Atlantic, to cross which implied a voyage of many months, these refugees seemed lost to the world.

But before the close of the nineteenth century the descendants of this feeble people had become one of the great powers of the earth.  They had established a republic whose sway extended from the Atlantic to the Pacific.  With an army of more than a million men, not on paper, but actually in the field, they had overthrown a domestic assailant.  They had maintained at sea a war-fleet of nearly seven hundred ships, carrying five thousand guns, some of them the heaviest in the world.  The tonnage of this navy amounted to half a million.  In the defense of their national life they had expended in less than five years more than four thousand million dollars.  Their census, periodically taken, showed that the population was doubling itself every twenty-five years; it justified the expectation that at the close of that century it would number nearly one hundred million souls.