Excerpt from Fifty Years of American Education: A Sketch of the Progress of Education in the United States But progress in mechanical inventions is but one phase of the development of science. Per haps the most significant changes of all have taken place in medicine. Forty years ago, says Sir William Osler, the world did not know the cause Of any of the great infections. Of all the great camp diseases plague, cholera, malaria, yellow fever, typhoid fever, typhus, and dysentery we know the mode of transmission, and of all but yellow fever, the germs. Man has now control of the most malign of Nature's forces in a way never dreamt of by our fathers. Half a century has done more than a hundred centuries to solve the problem of the first importance in his progress. Such are a few of the revolutionary changes which science has ushered in in the brief period of the half century which will, it seems, be known in history as the scientific age. Darwin's epochal discovery had been given to the world in I 8 59. Huxley, Spencer, Pasteur, Berthelot, Joule, Clerk Maxwell, Tait, and Kelvin were at work and Faraday was still alive when the period we are studying began. The creation of the sciences, always a slow process, had reached a period of intensification. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.