384 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 
vions experience of his own muscles had enabled our early 
inquirer to distinguish between a push and a pull. 
Augmented experience showed him that in the case of the 
magnet and the amber pulls and pushes attractions and 
repulsions were also exerted; and, by a kind of poetic 
transfer, he applied to things external to himself, concep- 
tions derived from himself. The magnet and the rubbed 
amber were credited with pushing and pulling,or, in other 
words, with exerting force. 
In the time of the great Lord Bacon the margin of these 
pushes and pulls was vastly extended by Dr. Gilbert, a man 
probably of firmer scientific fiber, and of finer insight, 
than Bacon himself. Gilbert proved that a multitude of 
other bodies, when rubbed, exerted the power which, thou- 
sands of years previously, had been observed in amber. In 
this way the notion of attraction and repulsion in external 
nature was rendered familiar. It was a matter of experi- 
ence that bodies, between which no visible link or connec- 
tion existed, possessed the power of acting upon each other; 
and the action came to be technically called " action at a 
distance." 
But out of experience in science there grows something 
finer than mere experience. Experience furnishes the soil 
for plants of higher growth; and this observation of action 
at a distance provided material for speculation upon the 
largest of problems. Bodies were observed to fall to the 
earth. Why should they do so? The earth was proved to 
revolve round the sun; and the moon to revolve round the 
earth. Why should they do so? What prevents them 
from flying straight off into space? Supposing it were 
ascertained that from a part of the earth's rocky crust a 
firmly fixed and tightly stretched chain started toward the 
sun, we might be inclined to conclude that the earth is 
held in its orbit by the chain that the sun twirls the 
earth around him, as a boy twirls round his head a bullet 
at the end of a string. But why should the chain be 
needed? It is a fact of experience that bodies can attract 
each other at a distance, without the intervention of any 
chain. Why should not the sun and earth so attract each 
othev? and why should not the fall of bodies from a height 
be the result of their attraction by the earth? Here then 
we reach one of those higher speculations which grow out 
of the fruitful soil of observation. Having started with 
