Abstract
THE death of Mr. Green, at the early age of forty-five years, we regard as a serious loss not only to historical literature but to science. We have frequently maintained that science has no peculiar sphere, that every field of human research is capable of scientific treatment. As we pointed out in reviewing Mr. Green's famous “Short History” and his “Making of England,” he has the credit of having been the first historian who appreciated the function of science in a State, or the moulding power of the environment of a people. Not only so, but he distinctly aimed at showing that the history of a people is simply an evolution dependent for its course and outcome on the action and reaction between the entity and its surroundings. This conception of the function of the historian was probably even more distinctly brought out in the “Geography of the British Isles,” by Mr. Green and his accomplished and congenial wife. As we pointed out in our notice of the “Short History” moreover, Mr. Green not only wrote his “History” on a scientific method, but gave large space in that history to a record of the progress of science and of scientific societies, as distinct and influential elements in the life of our nation. Indeed he may be regarded as the first historian who, breaking away from the old conventional methods of writing history from the outside, and thus mistaking the shell for the kernel, adopted the method of the physical geographer as distinct from the mere topographer, and, penetrating deep beneath the surface, traced the forces which have actuated the nation and brought it to its present standpoint. Although the impulse given by Mr. Green to historical study will certainly bear fruit, his loss cannot be overestimated. His “Making of England” was evidently only a prelude to a series of volumes in which he intended to show in minute detail the interaction between the various elements that go to make up the life of these islands,—the ethnical and moral elements on the one hand, and the encompassing physical elements on the other. Happily he has left behind him in a nearly complete state a second volume on “The Coming of the Northmen,” which brings his scheme down to the point when it may be said that all the forces were in the field, the continued action of which has gone to make up the England of to-day. Since Mr. Green's death ample testimony has been borne to his rigidly scientific method of work, and the patience with which he wrote and rewrote ere his own severely critical standard was reached. It will be difficult to find a successor to Mr. Green so far as stirring eloquence of style is concerned, but we trust that his scientific method may find favour, and that historians in future will endeavour to trace the life of a nation as he did, after the manner of the biologist and physical geographer.
Article PDF
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
John Richard Green . Nature 27, 462 (1883). https://doi.org/10.1038/027462a0
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/027462a0