1STATUKAL PHILOSOPHY. 



THE FUTURE PROGRESS OF PHYSICAL SCIEXCE. 



THAT no further improvement is desirable in the means and methods of 

 ascertaining the ship's place at sea, no one, I think, will from experience be 

 disposed to assert. The last time I crossed the Atlantic, I walked the quarter- 

 deck with the officer in charge of the noble vessel on one occasion when we 

 were driving along before a leading breeze and 'under a head of steam, 

 beneath a starless sky at midnight, at the rate certainly of ten or eleven 

 miles an hour. There is something sublime, but approaching the terrible, in 

 such a scene ; the rayless gloom, the midnight chill, the awful swell of the 

 deep, the dismal moan of the wind through the rigging, the all but volcanic 

 fires within the hold of the ship ; I scarce know an occasion in ordinary 

 life in which a reflecting mind feels more keenly its hopeless dependence on 

 irrational forces beyond its own control. I asked my companion how nearly 

 he could determine his ship's place at sea under favorable circumstances ; 

 theoreticaUy, he answered, I think, within a mile ; practically and usually 

 within three or four. My next question was, how near do you think we may 

 be to Cape Eace, that dangerous headland which pushes its iron-bound, un- 

 lighted bastions from the shore of Newfoundland far into the Atlantic, the 

 first land-fall to the homeward-bound American vessel. "We must, said he, 

 by our last observations and reckoning, be within three or four miles of Cape 

 Race. A comparison of those two remarks, under the circumstances in which 

 we were placed at the moment, brought my mind to the conclusion, that it is 

 greatly to be wished that the means should be discovered of finding the 

 ship's place more accurately, or that navigators would give Cape Race a little 

 wider berth. But I do not remember that one of the steam packets between 

 England and America was ever lost on that formidable point. 



It appears to me by no means unlikely that, with the improvement of 

 instrumental power and of the means of ascertaining the ship's time with 

 exactness, as great an advance beyond the present state of art and science in 

 finding a ship's place at sea may take place, as was effected by the invention 

 of the reflecting quadrant, the calculation of lunar tables, and the improved 

 construction of chronometers. 



I have no doubt we live on the verge of discoveries and inventions in every 

 department, as brilliant as any that have ever been made ; that there are 

 new truths, new facts, ready to start into recognition on every side ; and it 

 seems to me there never was an age, since the dawn of time, when men 



