Project Gutenberg #54475
Discoveries and Inventions of the Nineteenth Century
Robert Routledge
1900Routledge's illustrated survey of nineteenth-century engineering and invention, prepared chapter by chapter from Project Gutenberg HTML.
Project Gutenberg #54475 Public domain in the United States Cover source Local typographic cover created for MojiMori from public-domain source metadata
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those we have arrived at tend in any way to rob Nature of her beauty, or that our sense of the loveliness of colour is in any danger of being blunted by thus tracing out, as far as may be, the causes and sources of our sensations. The poets have occasionally said harsh things of science—indeed, one goes so far as to stigmatize the man of science as one who would “untwist the rainbow” and “botanize upon his mother’s grave;” and another thus laments dispelled illusions:
“When Science from Creation’s face Enchantment’s veil withdraws, What lovely visions yield their place To cold material laws!”
Now, in the case we have been considering, the scientific view is surely as beautiful as the ordinary one. We can, it is true, no longer regard the objects as having in themselves the colours which common observation attributes to them, but we look upon the material world as being, so to speak, the neutral canvas upon which Light, the great painter, spreads his varied tints, although, unlike the real canvas of an artist, which is not only neutral, but receives indifferently whatever hues are laid upon it, the objects around us exercise a selective effect—as if the picture of Nature were produced by each part of the canvas refusing all the tints save one, but itself supplying none. The tendency of the study of science to increase our interest in the great spectacle of Nature, and to enhance our appreciation of her charms, has been more justly indicated by another poet—thus:
“Nor ever yet The melting rainbow’s vernal tinctured hues To me have shone so pleasing, as when first The hand of Science pointed out the path In which the sunbeams gleaming from the west Fall on the watery cloud, whose darksome veil Involves the orient.”
416 Fig. 215.—Portrait of Professor Kirchhoff.