those bequeathed to it, and for executing both tasks with a good deal of care.  It brings skepticism to its aid in both, and subjects new and old conclusions to almost equally close analysis.  Each new pebble it picks up upon the shore of the Newtonian ocean it holds up square and askew to the light, and cross-examines color, texture and form.  Now and then, being but mortal after all, it chuckles too hastily over a brilliant find, but the blunder is not apt to wait long for correction.  Just now it appears to be overhauling its accounts in the item of science, taking stock of its discoveries in that field, balancing bad against good, and determining profit and loss.  Some once-promising entries have to undergo a black mark, while a few claims that were despaired of come to the fore.  This proceeding is only preparatory, however, to a new departure on a bolder scale.  Scientific progress knows only partial checks.  Its movement is that of a force en echelon:  one line may get into trouble and recoil, while the others and the general front continue to advance.  Theory does not profess to be certainty.  It is only tentative, and subject necessarily to frequent errors, for the elimination of which the severely skeptical spirit of the laws to which it is now held furnishes the best appliance.  Modern science possesses an internal vis medicatrix which prevents its suffering seriously from excesses or irregularities.  When it ventures to touch the shield of the Unknowable, it is only with the butt of its lance, and the inevitable overthrow is accepted with the least modicum of humiliation.

In that science which assumes to marshal all the others, philosophic and judicial history, ours ought to be the foremost age, if only because it has the aid of all the others.  It does more, however, than they can be said to have contemplated.  It widens the scope of history, and more precisely formalizes its functions.  It makes of the old chroniclers so many moral statisticians, fully utilizing at the same time their services as collectors of material facts.  The deductions thus arrived at it aims to test by the methods of the exact sciences.  It invites, in a certain degree, moral philosophy to don the trammels of mathematics and decorate its shadowy shoulders with the substantial yoke of the calculus.  Such is the programme of a school too young as yet to have matured its shape, but full of vigor and confidence, and a very promising outgrowth from the elder and more stately academy of abstract historical inquiry and generalization.  The latter has redeveloped and freshened up for us the pictures of the ancient story-tellers, and has furthermore had them, so to speak, engraved and scattered among the people, until we have come to live in the midst of their times and enjoy an intimate knowledge of the actual condition of human polity and intelligence at any given period.  Through the long gallery or the thick portfolio thus presented to our eye we may trace the common thread of motive under the varying conditions of time and circumstance.  This thread able hands are aiding us to discover.