Such knowledge of physical science as the Prince Consort's son possesses was largely imparted to him by the teacher Faraday, who was his father's choice. Appropriately enough, therefore, in the winter of 1897 did the Prince of Wales assist in founding the Faraday Laboratory of the Royal Society. The progress now spoken of seems to be symbolized by the acceptance of the word 'science' as the nearly exclusive synonym for that physicism which is strictly only one of the divisions that generically it includes. From the check to the regular teaching of physical knowledge at the disorganization spread through the world by the collapse of the Roman Empire, and by the concentration of human thought upon politics and theology, instead of those subjects first expounded by Thales, after him by Archimedes, Aristotle, Ptolemy, till the day of the modern doctors had dawned, the conquests achieved by man over nature were inconsiderable. Francis Bacon's equalization of human _ingenia_, and his elaborately tabulated apparatus for studying phenomena, created an appetite for mastering the arcana of the visible universe, but did not satisfy it. As the Prince Consort clearly saw, Nature's secret had been yielded in the past, and would be surrendered in the future, not to founders of systems like a Verulam or a Descartes, but to actual discoverers who did not owe even their methods to the Schools.
Half a century after Bacon's labours, Newton, with no help from Baconian methods discovered the law of gravitation, and with it the unity of sequences which pervade material creation. The cause of the slight progress of physical science whether before or immediately after Bacon formulated his method may be partly explained by the want of the material appliances for physical investigation. These in anything like their mechanical perfection of to-day are not much older than our present era. The agencies of glass, of alcohol, of microscopes and of other such appliances were as unknown to the physicists of Alexandria, of Athens, or of the Middle Ages as the electric wire itself. Where the subject matter, the heavenly bodies, the structure of the human frame, could be studied without elaborate machinery, the contemporaries or successors of the Ionian physicists who searched for the origin of all things in some single element, air, fire or water, seem rudely to have anticipated later discoveries. The Aristotelian philosophy and the rudiments of practical medicine, preserved together by Averrhoes, Avicenna, and the whole school of the Arabian thinkers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, descended in each other's company to the Italian schoolmen, and were delivered by them to English students. Thus, on the eve of the present century, the indestructibility of matter, however Protean the forms of its manifestations, had been ascertained by European chemists. The year of the Queen's accession was also that of the publication of Whewell's _History of the Inductive Sciences_.
