INTRODUCTION. 55 



the power exercised by the imagination over the domain of the 

 senses. In like manner, from the height occupied by the phys- 

 ical history of the world, all parts of the horizon will not ap- 

 pear equally clear and well defined. This indistinctness will 

 not, however, be wholly owing to the present imperfect state 

 of some of the sciences, but in part, likewise, to the unskill- 

 fulness of the guide who has imprudently ventured to ascend 

 these lofty summits. 



The object of this introductory notice is not, however, solelj 

 to draw attention to the importance and greatness of the phya 

 ical history' of the universe, for in the present day these are toe 

 well understood to be contested, but likewise to prove how, 

 without detriment to the stability of special studies, we may 

 be enabled to generalize our ideas by concentrating them in 

 cne common focus, and thus arrive at a point of view from 

 which all the organisms and forces of nature may be seen as 

 one living, active whole, animated by one sole impulse. " Na- 

 ture," as Schelling remarks in his poetic discourse on art, "is 

 not an inert mass ; and to him who can comprehend her vast 

 sublimity, she reveals herself as the creative force of the uni- 

 verse before all time, eternal, ever active, she calls to life all 

 things, whether perishable or imperishable." 



By uniting, under one point of view, both the phenomena 

 of our own globe and those presented in the regions of space, 

 we embrace the limits of the science of the Cosmos, and con 

 vert the physical history of the globe into the physical history 

 of the universe, the one term being modeled upon that of the 

 other. This science of the Cosmos is not, however, to be re- 

 garded as a mere encyclopedic aggregation of the most im- 

 portant and general results that have been collected together 

 from special branches of knowledge. These results are noth- 

 ing more than the materials for a vast edifice, and their com- 

 bination can not constitute the physical history of the world, 

 whose exalted part it is to show the simultaneous action and 

 the connecting links of the forces which pervade the universe. 

 The distribution of organic types in different climates and at 

 different elevations that is to say, the geography of plants 

 and animals differs as widely from botany and descriptive 

 zoology as geology does from mineralogy, properly so called. 

 The physical history of the universe must not, therefore, be 

 confounded with the Encyclopedias of the Natural Science^ 

 as they have hitherto been compiled, and whose title is ai 

 vague as their limits are ill defined. In the work before us, 

 partial facts will be considered only in relation to the whol 



