THE 



POPULAR SCIENCE 

 MONTHLY. 



SEPTEMBEK, 1872. 

 THE STtTDY OF SOCIOLOGY. 



By EEEBEET SPENCEE. 

 III. Nature of the Social Science. 



OUT of bricks, well burnt, hard, and sharp-angled, lying in heaps 

 by his side, the bricklayer builds, even without mortar, a wall of 

 some height that has considerable stability. With bricks made of bad 

 materials, irregularly burnt, warped, cracked, and many of them bro- 

 ken, he cannot build a dry wall of the same height and stability. The 

 dock-yard laborer, piling cannon-shot, is totally unable to make these 

 spherical masses stand at all as the bricks stand. There are, indeed, 

 certain quite definite shapes into which they may be piled that of a 

 tetrahedron, or that of a pyramid having a square base, or that of an 

 elongated wedge allied to the pyramid. In any of these forms they 

 may be put together symmetrically and stably ; but not in forms with 

 vertical sides or highly-inclined sides. Once more, if, instead of equal 

 spherical shot, the masses to be piled are bowlders, partially but irregu- 

 larly rounded, and of various sizes, no definite stable form is possible. 

 A comparatively-loose heap, indefinite in its surfaces and angles, is all 

 the laborer can make of them. Putting which several facts together, 

 and asking what is the most general truth they imply, we see it to be 

 this that the character of the aggregate is determined by the charac- 

 ters of the units. 



If we pass from units of these visible, tangible kinds, to the units 

 contemplated by chemists and physicists as making up masses of mat- 

 ter, the same truth meets us. Each so-called element, each combina- 

 tion of elements, each recombination of the compounds, has a form of 

 crystallization. Though its crystals differ in their sizes, and are liable 

 to be modified by truncations of angles and apices, and by partially 



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