42 Selections from Huxley 



the theory of 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. 



5 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 



10 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 



IS 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 "Physick" and Anatomy? 



20 Have the anatomist, the physiologist, or the physician, 

 whose business it has been to devote themselves assidu- 

 ously to that eminently practical and direct end, the allevia- 

 tion of the sufferings of mankind, have they been able 

 to confine their vision more absolutely to the strictly use- 



25 ful ? 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 



30 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 



