If our leading classes would still lead, they must not grudge the disturbance of progress.—Author, chap. i.
My retrospect, as I have repeatedly had occasion to say, opens towards the close of this nineteenth century. But although something short of a score of years only remained of that century, we were able to show some work of progress, for even so brief an interval. There was, indeed, a fairly creditable advance, for that far-back day, alike scientific and general. But as regards scientific progress, which is doubtless the great feature of my theme, my intention is to review it by itself, after we have passed through the first half of the thousand years' retrospect, in its other or ordinary progress. After the first five centuries, as I have already said, the world had emerged from its old limitations of the international divisions of mankind, and had entered upon the advanced position of one homogeneous society, speaking everywhere one and the same language. Meanwhile, until we reach that era, we shall take the social and material progress century by century, selecting, as
