8 14 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the compounds formed of those elements, and in the constitution 

 of the stars and the parts they perform in the grand whole. 



Are we authorized now to assume from this a unity of forms 

 that life may put on not only in the sister planets to ours, but 

 also in the other systems of worlds scattered through the skies ? 

 May we especially push our inductions still further and higher, 

 conclude from such material unity upon a mental and moral 

 unity, and say that, as there is only one physics and one chemistry 

 in the universe, there are also only one logic, one geometry, and 

 one moral, and that the beautiful, the good, and the true are iden- 

 tical and of the universal order everywhere ? 



Science, embracing in its results only immediate and demon- 

 strated facts, does not warrant us in going so far as this, but with 

 the truths it unfolds to us seems to invite us toward it. 



There were brilliant minds in antiquity, which upon bases 

 otherwise restricted conceived and proclaimed verities concerning 

 the world and the universe which the most modern science has 

 only been able to confirm. 



Let us, then, respect these cheerful speculations. If they are 

 still only of things preconceived, who can affirm that science will 

 not make them real to us to-morrow ? By establishing the laws 

 and harmonies of the material world, astronomy prepares us for 

 the conquest of truths of a still higher order. 



We can say then plainly that the subjection of natural forces 

 and the reign of man over Nature are only the first fruits of sci- 

 ence. It prepares other fruits for its votary of a higher and more 

 precious order. By the beauty of the studies to which it invites 

 him, by the grandeur of the horizons which it opens out to him, 

 and the sublimity of the spectacle it gives him of the laws and 

 harmonies of the universe, it promises to win him away from his 

 present preoccupations, which are perhaps too exclusively posi- 

 tive, and will restore to him under a new form and in an incom- 

 parable grandeur that taste for elevated poetry, that enthusiasm 

 for the beautiful, and that reverence for the ideal which are 

 among the most imperious needs of the human soul and which it 

 never abandons without peril. Translated for the Popular Science 

 Monthly from the Revue Scientifique. 



It is suggested by a correspondent of Nature as a possible advantage of 

 the want of symmeti^y in the ari-angement of the branches of trees, that the 

 want of synchronism of movement in consequence of it may help prevent 

 their being overturned in times of high wind. He speaks of having watched 

 the branches of a large plane tree during a high gale, when "it seemed 

 incredible that the tree could stand, but for the fact that while one large 

 limb was swaying one way, another would be swaying the opposite way, 

 and so on, all plunging and bending anyhow, with no two in harmony." 



