hand, the productions of industry ! In the words of a eulogist 

 of Watt, of half a cenrury ago : "It has increased indefinitely 

 the mass of human comforts and enjoyments, and rendered 

 cheap and accessible all over the world the materials of wealth 

 and prosperity ; it has armed the feeble hand of man, in short, 

 with a power to which no limits can be assigned ; completed 

 the dominion of mind over the most refractory qualities of 

 matter, and laid a sure foundation for all those future miracles 

 of mechanic power which are to aid and reward the labors of 

 after generations." If this was true half a century ago, how 

 much more true now, when engines like the Great Eastern's, 

 contrast with the grandest of Watt's, as giants with pigmies. 

 But the steam engine is only one of these direct contribu- 

 tions of science to industry. Time would fail me to speak of 

 others, or to enumerate the special gifts of particular sciences 

 to particular branches of the arts ; often of apparently the 

 more unpromising departments of science to the older and more 

 common of the arts ; as, from the chemistry of coal, the 

 beautiful aniline dyes, which give such brilliancy and variety 

 of coloring to our silks and other textile fabrics ; from the 

 abstract theory of the polarization of light, an instrument for 

 measuring the comparative sweetness of sugars ; and from the 

 physics of combustion, the safety lamp of Sir Humphrey Davy, 

 which has saved so many thousands of lives and so many mil- 

 lions of wealth, in the hazardous operations of mining. But 

 even more than to any other class of sciences, the industrial 

 world is indebted to the mathematics, from arithmetic and 

 geometry up through algebra and the calculus, to the highest 

 branches of analysis ; a class of sciences lying at the very 

 foundation of no small portion of the other sciences, and con- 

 stituting the most potent instrumentality we possess, for open- 

 ing up nature's laws, and enabling man to avail himself of her 



