36 COSMOS. 



ness will not, however, be wholly owing to the present imper- 

 fect state of some of the sciences, but in part, likewise, to the 

 unskilfulness of the guide who has imprudently ventured to 

 ascend these lofty summits. 



The object of this introductory notice is not, however, 

 solely to draw attention to the importance and greatness of 

 the physical history of the universe, for in the present day 

 these are too 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 one 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. 

 "Nature," 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 universe before all time, eternal, ever active, she calls to 

 life all things, whether perishable or imperishable." 



By unitiug, 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 convert 

 the physical history of the globe into the physical history of the 

 universe ; the one term being modelled upon that of the other. 

 This science of the Cosmos is not, however, to be regarded 

 as a mere encyclopaedic aggregation of the most important and 

 general results that have been collected together from special 

 branches of knowledge. These results are nothing more than 

 the materials for a vast edifice, and their combination cannot 

 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 distri- 

 bution 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 con- 

 founded with the Encyclopaedias of the Natural Sciences, as they 

 have hitherto been compiled, and whose title is as vague as 

 their limits are ill-defined. In the work before us, partial 

 facts will be considered only in relation to the whole. The 

 higher the point of view the greater is the necessity for a syste- 



