Dr Whewell's Inaugural Lecture. 9 



the aspect which they have at this moment in the magical 

 glass, which the enchanters of our time have made to rise out 

 of the ground like an exhalation. The infancy of nations, 

 their youth, their middle age, and their maturity, all appear 

 in their simultaneous aspect, like the most distant objects 

 revealed at the same moment by a flash of lightning in a 

 dusky night : — or we may compare the result to that which 

 would be produced, if we could suppose some one of the skil- 

 ful pliotogi'aphers whose subtle apparatus we have had exhi- 

 bited there, could bring within his field of view the surface 

 of the globe, with all its workshops and markets, and produce 

 instantaneously a permanent picture, in which the whole 

 were seen side by side. But it is not a mere picture of things 

 which are found standing together that we have had pre- 

 sented to us ; the great achievement was the bringing them 

 together. You have most of you probably heard of the care- 

 ful and economical critic, who proposed to reduce the extra- 

 vagance of the wish of the impatient separated lovers, that the 

 gods would annihilate space and time ; and who remarked 

 that it would answer the end desired if one of the two were 

 annihilated. By annihilating the space which separates dif- 

 ferent nations, we produce a spectacle in which is also anni- 

 hilated the time which separates one stage of a nation's pro- 

 gress from another. 



An ingenious speculator of our own day, clothing these 

 metaphysical abstractions in the form which modern science 

 assigns to them, has shewn how we might, theoretically 

 speaking, be, in a few instants, actual spectators, bodily and 

 contemporaneous eye-witnesses, of all the events which have 

 passed since man has existed upon earth. For, if we only 

 imagine that, as the visual impressions on the vehicle of light, 

 by which alune vision can take place, travel away from the 

 scenes by the occurrence of which their configuration was 

 given to them, we also travel after this moving vision, and 

 go but a very little faster than light itself, we shall overtake 

 successively the visual images of all successive events, and 

 see them as truly as a distant spectator (and what spectator 

 is not more or less distant X) sees what passes before his eyes. 

 We might thus see now what is passing around us, and the next 



