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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



perstructure of which judges have gone on 

 building, creating a vast fabric of case- 

 law, so voluminous and unwieldy that no 

 mortal man, no matter how great his ability 

 or attainments, can within the limits of 

 human life fully master it. To remedy this, 

 the evolution of the science of law has de- 

 veloped a method of collecting together, 

 from the vast libraries of reported ca es 

 and judge-made laws, the settled principles 

 therein contained, and of reducing them to 

 a carefully arranged and harmonious system 

 known as codes. This codification, when 

 enacted by the Legislature, becomes the 

 written law of the land, and takes the place 

 of the uncertain elastic line of precedents 

 founded on cases, and which, resting in the 

 " bosom of judges," might be colored by 

 their prejudices or warped by their interests 

 or passions. If these views are correct, 

 instead of unwritten law, either fundament- 

 al or statutory, furnishing the best means 

 of promoting the ends of justice, the reverse 

 is true, and the science of jurisprudence 

 must advance along the paths of written 

 laws, inflexible in their terms, and from 



which there is no escape other than through 

 prescribed and appropriate methods of 

 amendment. Charles E. Street. 



Huntington, Suffolk Countt, N. Y., | 

 March 26, 1883. j 



DECLAMATION. 

 Messrs. Editors: 



In the April number of " The Popular 

 Science Monthly," page 795, Mr. H. H. Bates 

 cites Maxwell's article, in the " Philosoph- 

 ical Magazine" for 1877, page 453. More 

 than five years before the publication of 

 Maxwell's note, I had shown ("Proc. Am. 

 Phil. Soc," xii, 394) that the ratio of the 

 vivial of wave-propagation to the vivial of 

 its oscillating particles is 5:9, and that the 

 ratio is determined by the secondary center 

 of oscillation between the ethereal center of 

 gravity and the ethereal center of linear 

 oscillation. Maxwell gave no reason for 

 his deduction, and his executors have been 

 unable to find any among his papers. 



Pliny Earle Chase. 

 Haveeford College, Pa., April 7, 1SS3. 



EDITOR'S TABLE. 



SCIENCE, LITER A TUBE, AND TEEOLOG T. 



THE discussion of the relations of 

 these great elements of thought 

 proceeds vigorously. "Line upon line 

 and precept upon precept " accumulate ; 

 while the last instructive line respect- 

 ing science and literature comes from 

 the London "Times," and the last 

 weighty precept concerning science and 

 theology from the President of Harvard 

 University. 



In connection with the meeting of 

 the civil engineers, held recently in Lon- 

 don, the " Times " of that city makes 

 the following significant declarations, 

 which it is desirable to place upon per- 

 manent record, both as the deliberate 

 utterance of an influential organ of pub- 

 lic opinion and because of the incon- 

 testable truth of the statement itself. 

 The " Times " says : 



" Meetings such as that of Saturday 

 evening remind us not merely of the 

 services of a particular branch of sci- 

 ence to mankind, but of the remarkable 

 determination of human activity to 



scientific pursuits which is character- 

 istic of the present age. Literature no 

 longer holds the place it once did in 

 the minds of men ; nor does it com- 

 mand, as it once did, the services of 

 the most powerful intelligences. The 

 protest against an education wholly or 

 chiefly consisting of the study of the 

 classics is the result of a profound 

 change in the conditions of life. Men 

 have not deliberately and as a result of 

 abstract reasoning discarded one set of 

 studies in favor of another. On the 

 contrary, they have discovered, often to 

 their great chagrin, that a complete in- 

 tellectual displacement has taken place. 

 That which was taken up under protest, 

 as a thing too closely connected with 

 utilitarian pursuits to be quite worthy 

 of a man of intellect, has now pressed 

 into its service tho chief intellectual 

 power of the country. The tide of in- 

 tellectual effort sets strongly in the di- 

 rection of science, just as at an earlier 

 period it set in the direction of letters. 

 The teachers and leaders of the day, the 



