420 ON THE CLASSIFICATION OF BOOKS, 



proceedings and transactions of academies and societies. Magnetism would 

 follow it into the same position were it not for tlie fact that all the earlier 

 literature of magnetism is bound up with that of light, heat, and electricity, 

 and the other subjects of physics so called; and the only practical connexion 

 that it maintains with astronomy and meteorology, that of the observatory, is 

 not universal, and is not so close as that which it maintains with geodesy. 



Navigation also is so connected with astronomy and meterology that it finds 

 its proper place with them. As a science it is not to be confounded with the 

 arts in which it has become embodied, even the special art of ship-sailing, which 

 lies neai'cst to it. Its enlargement in modern times with special practical refer- 

 ence to steam (G^), and its more general relationship to commerce {6^), has 

 caused tlie titles of a few of its books to be duplicated under those heads. 



Mechanics, in the order of sciences, should come under mathematics; as 2*, 

 but owing to the number of books which go into the details of machinery and 

 describe processes, it has been placed with applied mechanics, under manufac- 

 tures (G^). "When the arrangement was first made out, 2* was called mechanics, 

 or technology, and 2^ physics; but after a multitude of cards had been written 

 with the latter mark upon them, and still none appeared for pure technology, or 

 only one or two, while many were observed to require close connexion with 

 manufactures, the mistake was unfortunately committed of suppressing the 

 division 2* entirely. No complete arrangement, however, can be made with- 

 out it. 



Civil engineering occupies an anomalous station. Its correlate among the 

 scientific arts is geodesy (2'^); among the mechanic arts, architecture (7-'). 

 Works on civil engineering, as a science, are extremely few, and these few ought 

 certainly to form a subdivision either with geodesy or with architecture. Yet 

 after trial in both places they were finally grouped with a variety of other kindred 

 matter under manufactures (G^). For to this apparently alien locality had been 

 also banished the numerous reports on railroads, canals, and Avorks on steam, 

 under the pressure of a hardly describable convenience, which only those will 

 understand who are obliged to handle masses of such literature. The conveni- 

 ence here obeyed was, however, a true index of the natural relationships which 

 this whole branch of literature sustains to the class of the social sciences and 

 arts. But the very epithet of civil, applied to this kind of engineering, places 

 it in the sixth class, with the same certainty that mining engineering goes intx) 

 the third. 



Class III. Chemistry, as the abstract science of molecular life, must be con- 

 sidered the mathematics of the inorganic material world ; and it is only at first 

 confusing that the name (which cannot now be changed) means also the practical 

 applications of this knowledge, and all that flows from it, to the arts of life. 

 Chemistry may be as necessary to medicine and to manufactures as to metal- 

 lurgy; yet it will not be doubted by any man of science that in a correct 

 classification chemistry and metallurgy Avill go together, and with mineralogy 

 and geology; and will leave medicine and manufactures to find their own, per- 

 haps very distant places, for themselves. Medicine will carry pharnjaceutics with 

 it, and under manufactures will go dyeing, salt-making, soap-boiling, and a 

 hundred other chemical arts of common life ; but chemistry will still maintain 

 its true position as the opening division of the class of the inorganic sciences, 

 M'ith two chief subdivisions into inorganic and organic chemistry. 



Mining engineering might, with some propriety, be grouped with mineralogy 

 in 3^ as agriculture is w-ith botany in 4^. But this place is preoccupied hy 

 metallurgy, between Avhich and geology the department of mining engineering 

 practically and naturally interferes. It has therefore been made a division by 

 itself, 3\ 



PaJaeontology, merely as a transition from the study of the inorganic to tbe 



