244 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



practise; proposes the utilization of the bodies of condemned criminals 

 for experiments on the etiology of disease; calls for the prosecution 

 of systematic experiments with electricity, and the abandonment of 

 premature efforts to make practical use of that force, before its prop- 

 erties and behavior had been adequately investigated; and indicates the 

 possibility of the prosecution of certain experiences metaphysiques — i. e., 

 of investigations in what we should now call experimental psychology. 

 He concludes his program somewhat humorously with an enumera- 

 tion of recherches a interdire — namely, those 'chimeras of science,' 

 the philosopher's stone, the quadrature of the circle and perpetual 

 motion. In regard to the first of these, however — the transmutation 

 of elements — he points out that the thing can not be shown to be in- 

 herently impossible. For there are several legitimate hypotheses about 

 the constitution of matter which are compatible with the possibility 

 of transmutation. It is not unlikely, for example, that 'matter is 

 composed of homogeneous parts,' and that the elements which appear 

 to possess irreducible qualitative differences, 'really differ from one 

 another only by the dissimilar form and arrangement of the homo- 

 geneous particles which compose them.' In that case, we should not 

 be entitled to declare it impossible to give 'to such particles a different 

 form and arrangement, which is all that would be necessary in order to 

 transmute lead or wool into gold. ' The objection to the search for the 

 means of transmuting elements is, therefore, not that it can be demon- 

 strated to aim at the impossible, but only that in the existing state of 

 science, the value of the goal — great as it would be — 'is not great 

 enough to counterbalance the scant probability of attaining it.' When 

 one reminds oneself of the hypotheses about the constitution of matter 

 that have come into especial vogue since the discovery of the properties 

 of radium, these observations strike one as the expression of a rather 

 well balanced judgment. 



It was, however, in his conception of the methods and the possibilities 

 of natural history that Maupertuis most evidently showed himself the 

 possessor of a wider intellectual horizon than was common among the 

 men of science of his time. Zoologists had as yet seen little occasion to 



4 



attempt more than the careful description and classification of animals ; 

 but to Maupertuis a purely descriptive and classificatory science, which 

 was unable to formulate any laws concerning the processes going on in 

 that part of nature with which it dealt, was, strictly speaking, no science 

 at all. He had little patience with naturalists whose view of their 

 province was so narrow. 'All these treatises on animals which we as 

 yet have,' he writes in the 'Lettres sur le Progres des Sciences,' 'are 

 — even the most methodical of them — : no better than pictures pretty to 

 look at ; in order to make of natural history a veritable science, natural- 

 ists must apply themselves to researches which can make us acquainted, 

 not simply with the form of this or that animal, but with the general 



