ABSTRACT
I shall now ask you to accompany me in a brief review, or abstract, of the history of the past. It will be best suited to our purpose if we first of all consider important events and changes of a more or less political character, then separately recover our ground with chief regard to science and scientific discovery. Let me ask you once more to assume the supposed position of persons dwelling in the world, let us say, about 1880, and to try and imagine yourselves on a par with them as regards the knowledge that has been gained since, and has wrought itself into the history of the last three hundred years. Suppose yourselves knowing just what nineteenth-centenarians might know, ignorant of what was futurity to them, ignorant of the things of your real era, our present year 232180 to wit. I shall continue to speak to you now as though I deemed you what I have just said, and I think we shall find that that will greatly facilitate the main object of these lectures.
