ABSTRACT
In many ways the developments of the age of progress continued into the late nineteenth century. Of all the natural sciences, chemistry was the public face of continued, uninterrupted progress in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. The synthesis of indigo dye in 1880 by the German chemist Adolf Baeyer was a continuation of previous successes in synthesizing organic chemicals. The discovery of elements such as gallium, scandium and germanium between 1875 and 1886 confirmed, effectively, Dmitri Mendeleev's predictions in his periodic table of the elements. In the post-mid-century decades, the emergent social sciences had been characterized by two main themes. One of these was conceptual, an understanding of human society and human history as a story of progress, generally understood as running through distinct stages, and frequently given a biological, evolutionary interpretation. The other was methodological, a positivist commitment to the empirical examination of evidence, modelled on or considered in parallel with the natural and physical sciences.
