684 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



of the web, and lowering himself quickly to the ea\*th by his silken 

 ladder. 



"We here reach the perplexing question of " female rights," but 

 decline to pursue it. " The Poet at the Breakfast-Table " has just 

 bravely taken it up from this point of view, recommending the reforma- 

 tory ladies to organize "Arachnoid Associations," with "Spinsters 

 and Spiders" for a motto, and we leave the subject trustingly in his 

 hands. 







MAN AS THE INTEEPKETEK OF NATUKE. 



Br WILLIAM B. CAEPENTEE, LL. D., F. E. S. 



IT has been customary with successive occupants of this chair to 

 open the proceedings of the meetings over which they respectively 

 presided with a discourse on some aspect of Nature in her relation to 

 man. But I am not aware that any one of them has taken up the 

 other side of the inquiry that which concerns man as the " Inter- 

 preter of Nature ; " and I have therefore thought it not inappropriate 

 to lead you to the consideration of the mental processes by which are 

 formed those fundamental conceptions of matter and force, of cause 

 and effect, of law and order, which furnish the basis of all scientific 

 reasoning, and constitute the PhilosopJiia prima of Bacon. There is 

 a great deal of what I cannot but regard as fallacious and misleading 

 philosophy " oppositions of science, falsely so called " abroad in the 

 world at the present time. And I hope to satisfy you that those who 

 set up their own conceptions of the orderly sequence which they dis- 

 cern in the phenomena of Nature as fixed and determinate laws, by 

 which those phenomena not only are, but always have been, and al- 

 ways must be, invariably governed, are really guilty of the intellectual 

 arrogance they condemn in the systems of the ancients, and place 

 themselves in antagonism to those real philosophers by whose grasp 

 and insight that order has been so far disclosed. For what love of the 

 truth, as it is in Nature, was ever more conspicuous than that which 

 Kepler displayed in his abandonment of each of the conceptions of the 

 planetary system which his imagination had successively devised, so 

 soon as it proved to be inconsistent with the facts disclosed by obser- 

 vation ? In that almost admiring description of the way in which his 

 enemy Mars, " whom he had left at home a despised captive," had 

 " burst all the chains of the equations, and broke forth from the 

 prisons of the tables," who does not recognize the justice of Schiller's 



1 Inaugural Address of Dr. Carpenter before the British Association for the Advance- 

 ment of Science, at Brighton, England, August 14, 1872, upon assuming the chair as 

 president of that body. 



