i.] ON IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE. 13 



universal gravitation and endless force. While learning how 

 to handle gases led to the discovery of oxygen, and to 

 modern chemistry, and to the notion of the indestructibility of 

 matter. 



Again, what simpler, or more absolutely practical, than the 

 attempt to keep the axle of a wheel from heating when the 

 wheel turns round very fast ? How useful for carters and gig 

 drivers to know something about this ; and how good were it, if 

 any ingenious person would find out the cause of such phenomena, 

 and thence educe a general remedy for them. Such an ingenious 

 person was Count Rumford; and he and his successors have 

 landed us in the theory of the persistence, or indestructibility, 

 of force. And in the infinitely minute, as in the infinitely great, 

 the seekers after natural knowledge, of the kinds called physical 

 and chemical, have everywhere found a definite order and 

 succession of events which seem never to be infringed. 



And how has it fared with &quot; Physick &quot; and Anatomy ? Have 

 the anatomist, the physiologist, or the physician, whose business 

 it has been to devote themselves assiduously to that eminently 

 practical and direct end, the alleviation of the sufferings of 

 mankind, have they been able to confine their vision more 

 absolutely to the strictly useful ? I fear they are worst offenders 

 of all. For if the astronomer has set before us the infinite 

 magnitude of space, and the practical eternity of the duration 

 of the universe ; if the physical and chemical philosophers have 

 demonstrated the infinite minuteness of its constituent parts, and 

 the practical eternity of matter and of force ; and if both have 

 alike proclaimed the universality of a definite and predicable 

 order and succession of events, the workers in biology have not 

 only accepted all these, but have added more startling theses of 

 their own. For, as the astronomers discover in the earth no 

 centre of the universe, but an eccentric speck, so the naturalists 

 find man to be no centre of the living world, but one amidst 

 endless modifications of life ; and as the astronomer observes the 

 mark of practically endless time set upon the arrangements of 

 the solar system so the student of life finds the records of ancient 



