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The World Set Free-Part3_H. G. WELLS (1866-1946)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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of the sort....'

Yet that boy lived to fly across the Atlantic and edit his



father's reminiscences.

Section 7



At the close of the nineteenth century as a multitude of passages

in the literature of that time witness, it was thought that the



fact that man had at last had successful and profitable dealings

with the steam that scalded him and the electricity that flashed



and banged about the sky at him, was an amazing and perhaps a

culminating exercise of his intelligence and his intellectual



courage. The air of 'Nunc Dimittis' sounds in same of these

writings. 'The great things are discovered,' wrote Gerald Brown



in his summary of the nineteenth century. 'For us there remains

little but the working out of detail.' The spirit of the seeker



was still rare in the world; education was unskilled,

unstimulating, scholarly, and but little valued, and few people



even then could have realised that Science was still but the

flimsiest of trial sketches and discovery scarcely beginning. No



one seems to have been afraid of science and its possibilities.

Yet now where there had been but a score or so of seekers, there



were many thousands, and for one needle of speculation that had

been probing the curtain of appearances in 1800, there were now



hundreds. And already Chemistry, which had been content with her

atoms and molecules for the better part of a century, was



preparing herself for that vast next stride that was to

revolutionise the whole life of man from top to bottom.



One realises how crude was the science of that time when one

considers the case of the composition of air. This was



determined by that strange genius and recluse, that man of

mystery, that disembowelled intelligence, Henry Cavendish,



towards the end of the eighteenth century. So far as he was

concerned the work was admirably done. He separated all the known



ingredients of the air with a precisionaltogetherremarkable; he

even put it upon record that he had some doubt about the purity



of the nitrogen. For more than a hundred years his determination

was repeated by chemists all the world over, his apparatus was



treasured in London, he became, as they used to say, 'classic,'

and always, at every one of the innumerable repetitions of his



experiment, that sly element argon was hiding among the nitrogen

(and with a little helium and traces of other substances, and



indeed all the hints that might have led to the new departures of

the twentieth-century chemistry), and every time it slipped



unobserved through the professorial fingers that repeated his

procedure.



Is it any wonder then with this margin of inaccuracy, that up to

the very dawn of the twentieth-century scientific discovery was



still rather a procession of happy accidents than an orderly

conquest of nature?



Yet the spirit of seeking was spreading steadily through the

world. Even the schoolmaster could not check it. For the mere



handful who grew up to feel wonder and curiosity about the

secrets of nature in the nineteenth century, there were now, at



the beginning of the twentieth, myriads escaping from the

limitations of intellectualroutine and the habitual life, in



Europe, in America, North and South, in Japan, in China, and all

about the world.



It was in 1910 that the parents of young Holsten, who was to be

called by a whole generation of scientific men, 'the greatest of



European chemists,' were staying in a villa near Santo Domenico,

between Fiesole and Florence. He was then only fifteen, but he



was already distinguished as a mathematician and possessed by a

savage appetite to understand. He had been particularly attracted



by the mystery of phosphorescence and its apparent unrelatedness

to every other source of light. He was to tell afterwards in his



reminiscences how he watched the fireflies drifting and glowing

among the dark trees in the garden of the villa under the warm



blue night sky of Italy; how he caught and kept them in cages,

dissected them, first studying the general anatomy of insects






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