47 
ber. The tree, the animal grows, the flood abates, the train progresses, 
mind matures, life expands, love deepens and broadens. 
“Chance and change are busy ever, 
Man decays and ages move.’’ 
God alone changeth not. 
But everything we see, all else we can think of, is in a state of flux. 
The rate of these changes is matter of Common observation and com- 
ment, and it is nothing but the first differential coefficient. Tait says 
every one uses the ideas of the calculus if he is not a fool. I doubt 
whether any of us, without we consciously give ourselves to reflection 
upon the subject, begin to see the clearness, the depth, the breadth, the 
comprehensiveness, of Newton's philosophic vision when he gave to the 
world the words fluent and flurion in connection with his new culture. 
As caleulus was the first master-word spoken to the very soul of na- 
ture, so it has wrested from her first this secret then that, until man with 
this powerful ally is rapidly enslaving all her powers to work out his own 
will. 
The calculus rewarded its discoverer by giving him the demonstration 
of the invisible chains binding the moon to the earth and then by deliver- 
ing into his hand the secret of the system of the world. Who will esti- 
mate the services to civilization of these cosmical studies? Old supersti- 
tions disappeared forever. A man’s horoscope became only a poetic 
fancy. Men no longer prayed to be delivered from the flesh, the devil and 
the comet. But our solar system was reduced to order and beauty, while 
mathematical analysis reached out with her long, delicate, quivering 
fingers and snatched from the depths of space a new planet—neyver seen 
by the unaided eye of man—to enrich the retinue of our sun, and to dem- 
onstrate the divinity of the human intellect. 
This was the first great conquest of the calculus. But when it was 
turned upon things terrestrial, it exerted an influence less dazzling per- 
haps, but no less profound. It laid the foundations, more perhaps than 
any other one thing, for our age of brilliant invention and startling discoy- 
ery. Great generalizations have sprung from active imagination and pa- 
tient accumulation of facts. But these usually have a far richer content 
than their first announcers dream of. The calculus analyzes these great 
thoughts, recombines them and produces results the most unexpected and 
important. 
