258 SCIENCE IN SHORT CHAPTEES. 



most of the readers of such letters will, as a matter of course, read 

 the inaugural address of the President of the British Association, I 

 have accepted the duty of correcting among my own readers the false 

 impression which this address may create. 



As a set-off to the authoritative utterances of Sir "W. Thomson on 

 the subject of atoms, I quote the following from an Italian philoso- 

 pher, who, during the present year, is holding in Italy a position very 

 similar to that of the annual President of our British Association. 



Professor Cannizzaro has been elected by a society of Italian chem- 

 ists to act as this year's director of a Chronicle of the Progress of 

 Chemical Science in Italy and abroad. In this capacity he has pub- 

 lished an inaugural treatise on the history of modern chemical 

 theory, in the course of which he thus speaks of the over-confident 

 atomic theorists : " They often speak on molecular subjects with 

 as much dogmatic assurance as though they had actually realized the 

 ingenious fiction of Laplace had constructed a microscope by which 

 they could detect the molecules, and observe the number, forms, and 

 arrangements of their constituent atoms, and even determine the 

 direction and intensity of their mutual actions. Many of these 

 things, offered at what they are worth that is, as hypotheses more 

 or less probable, or as simple artifices of the intellect may serve, 

 and really have served, to collocate facts and incite to further investi- 

 gations which, one day or other, may lead to a true chemical theory ; 

 but, when perverted by being stated as truths already demonstrated, 

 they falsify the intellectual education of the students of inductive 

 science, and bring reproach on the modern progress of chemistry." 



I translate the above from the first page of the first number of the 

 Gazetta Chimica Italiana, published at Palermo in January last. Had 

 these words been written in Edinburgh on the evening of the 2d of 

 August, in direct application to Sir William Thomson's address, they 

 could not have described more pointedly and truly the prevailing 

 vice of this production. If space permitted, I could go further back 

 and quote the words of Lord Bacon, from the great text-book of in- 

 ductive philosophy, wherein he denounces the worship of all such 

 intellectual idols as our modern mathematical dreamers have created, 

 and which they so fervently adore. 



An able writer in the Daily News of last Friday is very severe upon 

 the biological portion of the President's address, which contains a 

 really original hypothesis. Sir W. Thomson having stated that he is 

 " ready to adopt as an article of scientific faith, true through all 

 space and through all time, that life proceeds from life, and from 

 nothing but life, ' ' asks the question, ' ' How then did life originate on 

 the earth ?" and tells us that " if a probable solution consistent with 

 the ordinary course of nature can be found, we must not invoke an 

 abnormal act of creative power." 



He assumes, with that perfect confidence in mathematical hypothe- 

 ses which is characteristic of the school of theorists which he leads, 

 that " tracing the physical history of the earth backward, on strictly 

 dynamical principles, we are brought to a red-hot melted globe, on 

 which no life could exist ;" and then, to account for the beginning of 

 life on our earth as it cooled down, he creates another imaginary 

 world, which he brings in collision with a second similar creation, 

 and thereby shatters it to fragments. He further imagines that one 

 of these imaginary broken-up worlds was already stocked with the 



