ABSTRACT
THESE samples of nineteenth-century developments, thus summarily presented, should in themselves serve to answer some of the questions about the interaction of science and technique and of their dependence on economic and social factors that were raised at the beginning of this essay. At the same time it must be admitted that in the very richness and variety of the events they record they may convey an impression of confusion. The confusion is real enough, it was even somewhat deliberately provoked at the time as the expression of a natural and unrestrained interplay of initiatives in a period of free enterprise and competition. The nineteenth century was fully aware of itself as an era of Progress. It was then almost impious to examine how that progress came about save as a removal of the restrictions of an earlier and inferior aristocratic domination. But we, to whom all this is past history, must needs strive, if we are to understand and control the developments of our own time, to make some sense out of the maze of events that have led to the world as we know it. The very difficulty of doing so may conceal a clue.
