Nor is their any lack either of guidance, or of aids to ignorance.  By a happy chance, the first edition of Whewell’s ’History of the Inductive Sciences’ was published in 1837, and it affords a very useful view of the state of things at the commencement of the Victorian epoch.  As to subsequent events, there are numerous excellent summaries of the progress of various branches of science, especially up to 1881, which was the jubilee year of the British Association.[D] And, with respect to the biological sciences, with some parts of which my studies have familiarised me, my personal experience nearly coincides with the preceding half-century.  I may hope, therefore, that my chance of escaping serious errors is as good as that of anyone else, who might have been persuaded to undertake the somewhat perilous enterprise in which I find myself engaged.

There is yet another prefatory remark which it seems desirable I should make.  It is that I think it proper to confine myself to the work done, without saying anything about the doers of it.  Meddling with questions of merit and priority is a thorny business at the best of times, and unless in case of necessity, altogether undesirable when one is dealing with contemporaries.  No such necessity lies upon me, and I shall, therefore, mention no names of living men, lest, perchance, I should incur the reproof which the Israelites, who struggled with one another in the field, addressed to Moses—­’Who made thee a prince and a judge over us.’

[Sidenote:  The aim of physical science]

Physical science is one and indivisible.  Although, for practical purposes, it is convenient to mark it out into the primary regions of Physics, Chemistry, and Biology, and to subdivide these into subordinate provinces, yet the method of investigation and the ultimate object of the physical inquirer are everywhere the same.

[Sidenote:  the discovery of the rational order of the universe]

The object is the discovery of the rational order which pervades the universe, the method consists of observation and experiment (which is observation under artificial conditions) for the determination of the facts of nature, of inductive and deductive reasoning for the discovery of their mutual relations and connection.  The various branches of physical science differ in the extent to which at any given moment of their history, observation on the one hand, or ratiocination on the other, is their more obvious feature, but in no other way, and nothing can be more incorrect than the assumption one sometimes meets with, that physics has one method, chemistry another, and biology a third.

[Sidenote:  It is based on postulates]