EPILOGUE 1097 



Number, and the heart and soul and all the poetry of Natural 

 Philosophy are embodied in the concept of mathematical beauty. 

 A greater than Verhaeren had this in mind when he told of "the 

 golden compasses prepared In God's eternal store." A greater than 

 Milton had magnified the theme and glorified Him "that sitteth 

 upon the circle of the earth," saying: He hath measured the waters 

 in the hollow of his hand, and meted out heaven with the span, 

 and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure. 

 , Moreover, the perfection of mathematical beauty is such (as Colin 

 Maclaurin learned of the bee), that whatsoever i& most beautiful 

 and regular is also found to be most useful and excellent. 



Not only the movements of the heavenly host must be 

 determined by observation and elucidated by mathematics, but 

 whatsoever else can be expressed by number and defined by 

 natural law. This is the teaching of Plato and Pythagoras, and 

 the message of Greek wisdom to mankind. So the living and 

 the dead, things animate and inanimate, we dwellers in the world 

 and this world wherein we dwell — Travra ya fxav ra yiyvcoGKo^eva — 

 are bound alike by physical and mathematical law. " Conterminous 

 with space and coeval with time is the kingdom of Mathematics; 

 within this range her dominion is supreme ; otherwise than according 

 to her order nothing can exist, and nothing takes place in contradiction 

 to her laws." So said, some sixty years ago, a certain mathe- 

 matician* ; and Philolaus the Pythagorean had said much the same. 



But with no less love and insight has the science of Form and 

 Number been appraised in our own day and generation by a very 

 great Naturalist indeedf — by that old man eloquent, that wise 

 student and pupil of the ant and the bee, who died while this book 

 was being written ; who in his all but saecular Hfe had tasted of the 

 firstfruits of immortality; who curiously conjoined the wisdom 

 of antiquity with the learning of today; whose Proven9al verse 

 seems set to Dorian music; in whose plainest words is a sound 

 as of bees' industrious murnmr; and who, being of the same 

 blood and marrow with Plato and Pythagoras, saw in Number le 

 comment et le pourquoi des choses, and found in it la clef de voute de 

 V Univers. 



* William Spottiswoode, in his presidential address to the' British Association at 

 Dublin in 1878. t Henri Fabre. 



