MECHANICS AND USEFUL ARTS. 41 



the attendance of feudal tenants at their lord's court, and the summons of 

 burghers to grant supplies of money, the great discovery of modern times 

 in the science of practical politics has been effected, the representative 

 scheme which enables states of any extent to enjoy popular government, 

 and allows mixed monarchy to be established, combining freedom with 

 order, a plan pronounced by the statesmen and writers of antiquity to be of 

 hardly possible formation, and wholly impossible continuance. The globe 

 itself, as well as the science of its inhabitants, has been explored according 

 to the law which forbids a sudden and rapid leaping forward, and decrees 

 that each successive step, prepared by the last, shall facilitate the next. 

 Even Columbus followed several successful discoverers on a smaller scale, 

 and is, by some, believed to have had, unknown to him, a predecessor in 

 the great exploit by which he pierced the night of ages, and unfolded a new 

 world to the eyes of the old. 



The arts atford no exception to the general law. Demosthenes had emi- 

 nent forerunners, Pericles the last of them. Homer must have had prede- 

 cessors of great merit, though doubtless as far surpassed by him as Fra Bar- 

 tolomeo and Pietro Perugino were by Michael Angelo and Raphael. Dante 

 owed much to Virgil; he may be allowed to have owed, through his Latin 

 mentor, not a little to the old Grecian ; and Milton had both the orators and 

 the poets of the ancient world for his predecessors and his masters. The 

 art of war itself is no exception to the rule. The plan of bringing an over- 

 powering force to bear on a given point had been tried occasionally before 

 Frederick II. reduced it to a system; and the Wellingtons and Napoleons of 

 our own day made it the foundation of their strategy, as it had also been 

 previously the mainspring of our naval tactics. It has oftentimes been held 

 that the invention of logarithms stands alone in the history of science, as 

 having been preceded by no step leading towards the discovery. There is, 

 however, great inaccuracy in this statement; for not only was the doctrine of 

 infinitesimals familiar to its illustrious author, and the relation of geometri- 

 cal to arithmetical series well known, but he had himself struck out several 

 methods of great ingenuity and utility (as that known by the name of 

 Napier's Bones ) methods that are now forgotten, eclipsed as they were by 

 the consummation which has immortalized his name. So the inventive pow- 

 ers of Watt, preceded as he was by Worcester and Newcomen, but far more 

 materially by Gauss and Papin, had been exercised on some admirable con- 

 trivances, now forgotten, before he made the step which created the steam- 

 engine anew not only the parallel motion, possibly a corollary to the prop- 

 osition on circular motion in the " Principia," but the separate condensation, 

 and above all, the governor, perhaps the most exquisite of mechanical inven- 

 tions ; and now we have those here present who apply the like principle to 

 the diffusion of knoAvledge, aware, as they must be, that its expansion has 

 the same happy effect naturally of preventing mischief from its excess which 

 the skill of the great mechanist gave artificially to steam, thus rendering his 

 engine as safe as it is powerful. The grand difference, then, between one 

 discovery or invention and another, is in degree rather than in kind; the 

 degree in which a person, while he outstrips those whom he comes after, also 

 lives, as it were, before his age. Nor can any doubt exist that, in this re- 

 spect, Newton stands at the head of all who have extended the bounds of 

 knowledge. The sciences of dj'namics and of optics are especially to be 

 regarded in this point of view; but the former in particular; and the com- 

 pleteness of the system which he unfolded its having been at the first elab- 



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