18 Scientific Societies. 



meeting of the British Association at Nottingham, what sights 

 would have greeted his eyes, what words have met his ears ? 

 Around him he would have seen on all sides machinery, so exqui- 

 site and wonderful, that it seemed rather to approximate to the 

 delicacy of the living organism. The telescope would have opened a 

 passage for his eyesight into unseen spaces sown thick as dust with 

 rolling suns: the microscope would have revealed an infinity beneath 

 his feet teeming with the beauty and wonder of forms more delicate 

 than the sculptor could imagine, more exquisitely tinted than the 

 painter's pencil could reproduce — which yet but a few years ago 

 had never even been seen by any mortal eye. And what would he 

 have heard ? Accurate inquiries into the minutest forms of animal 

 and vegetable life, the results of an intense and loving observation 

 of regions of existence which might have seemed to the eye of 

 ignorance common and unclean, but which have been illuminated 

 by human genius into spheres full of enchantment — into magic 

 casements opening, not on the foam of perilous seas, but " on 

 unimaginable realms of faerie." And if, weary of a gaze straining 

 down into the microscopic abysses of the infinity below us, 

 Sophocles had left these minute philosophers to enter into the 

 lecture room of some other section, he would have listened with 

 ever-increasing amazement to the grave and quiet story of men 

 who had numbered and weighed the stars, and from the analysis 

 of their spectra had recognised their constituent materials, and 

 discovered the secret why sometimes they blaze forth and fade 

 away ; of men who had predicted the existence of Neptune ere 

 one of its faint rays had reached the human retina out of the 

 dim immensity of those inconceivable spaces where it rolls upon 

 its solitary round ; of men who had measured the speed of 

 every ray of light, and proved that it carries with it a history of 

 the source whence first its tremulous vibration began to emanate; 

 who had discovered that the friction of the tidal wave retards the 

 motion of the world on which they live, and that such retardation 

 had appreciably accelerated the motion of its attendant moon, and 

 that heat, and light, and electricity are but different modifications 

 of force and motion, so that, as our president explained to you 

 at the first meeting of this term, the blaze of the sun himself could 

 be produced by the mere rushing of meteorites, attracted by the 

 laws of gravitation into contact with his mighty surface. Beyond 

 that, our ancient poet would not care to go. Suddenly set face to 

 face with the knowledge of an infinity above him, in which the 

 worlds lay thick as the golden dust on the floors of a Roman 

 emperor — of an infinity beneath him, stretching lower than could 

 ever plummet sound, and yet taught at the same moment how 

 far into that upper infinity the eagle wing of science had 



