aspect was not even looked at.  Buffon’s acute but for the most part empiric speculations on the structure of the globe were a step in advance; but the science of geology he did not recognize, and left to be shaped a very little later by Hutton.  Priestley, Cavendish and Lavoisier were dissecting the impalpable air and making the gaseous form of substances as familiar and manageable as the solid.  Hence true analytic chemistry.  Astronomy, an older science, had derived new precision from the first observed transit of Venus, imperfect as were the data obtained and the calculations made.

Contemporaneous with this sudden apparition of new fields of scientific discovery and enlargement of the old was an intellectual movement of a more general character than that necessarily involved in the progress of natural philosophy.  The French Encyclopaedists took hold of social, moral and juridical questions with an unsparing vigor that could not be gainsaid.  The art of criticism was simultaneously introduced, perfected and applied.  Many of the wrongs and follies that paralyzed thought and industry were dragged to light.  Hoary absurdities that smothered law and gospel under the foul mass of privilege and superstition, and made them a curse instead of a blessing, shrank before the storm of ridicule and denunciation.  Those which did not at once succumb were placed in a position of publicity and exposure in which they could not long survive.  The great upheaval of which the French Revolution was a part was thus originated.

Sounder political ideas were brought within reach of the masses, till then not recipient, it may almost be said, of any political ideas at all.  Statesmen and governments were similarly enlightened, Adam Smith’s declaration of commercial antedated by two years Mr. Jefferson’s of political independence.  The atrocities of the English criminal code, approaching those of Draco, were put in process of correction, though, as usual in British reforms, it took half a century to effect their complete removal; a woman having been, if we recollect rightly, hanged for a trifling theft in the last years of George IV.  This same slowness of that conservative but persevering people is calculated to blind us to the operation among them of deep-seated and active influences.  Hardly till 1815 can we discover in England any fervor, much less efficiency, in the demand for an extension of popular rights and relaxation of the grasp of privilege.  Irish manufactures continued to be distinctly and rigidly repelled from competition with English by formal statute; Jewish and Catholic disqualification was maintained; the game-laws and the rotten-borough system, which conferred on the nobility and gentry arbitrary power over the purse and person of the commonalty, were determinedly upheld; counsel was only nominally allowed to the defendant in criminal cases; chancery withheld or plundered without resistance or appeal; and there can be no doubt that life and property were better