concerning the Actions of Machines. 79 



cure, not a screw would hold, were it not for its pervading 

 agency. Without friction this woild would have exhibited 

 a scene of indescribable confusion. Conceive for a moment, 

 its influence suspended, and where would be progressive mo- 

 tion.? how would we climb the steep, how, even, would we 

 walk along the plain.? The mountain masses, rushing to 

 the plains, and not arrested even there, as now, but hastening 

 along with undiminished speed, would leave no spot for vege- 

 table, no safety for animal life : though dashed to powder by 

 repeated blows, each particle would yet move onward, and 

 chaos would be realized. Far, then, from friction marring the 

 general design, it itself is one of the most admirable and most 

 beneficent provisions which nature's God has made for the feli- 

 city of his creatures. 



When we glance over the vast fields of modern science, and 

 contemplate the harmony that reigns among the known laws, 

 when we consider the ease with which geometry is engrafted on 

 arithmetic, the perfect acquaintance with geometric laws which 

 is exhibited in the contrivance of the mechanical ones, we can- 

 not imagine that the law of friction militates against or annuls 

 one really existing law of nature. Chemistry has acquainted 

 us with the permanency and indestructibility of matter ; me- 

 chanics has taught us that the entire amount of momentum 

 estimated in any given direction, is absolutely fixed, and has 

 indicated that, except where friction and chemical changes in- 

 terfere, the total amount of motion in the universe is unchange- 

 able. The recent discoveries in galvanism and electricity shed 

 a new light upon the subject. 



The combustion of the coals, the chemical union of the car- 

 bon with the oxygen in the furnace of the steam-engine, gene- 

 rates motion ; that motion is extinguished partly by friction, 

 and partly in effecting the disintegration of bodies ; and it now 

 seems more than probable that this rubbing and this subdivi- 

 sion of matter induces a state, and communicates that state to 

 surrounding objects, which afterwards goes, in some distant 

 quarter perhaps, to reproduce chemical changes preparatory to 

 a new evolution of the like forces. Small, indeed, as that 

 change must be when absorbed into the general mass, it is not 

 on that account the less real. The mass of stone that has been 



