296 DISCOURSE ON THE STUDY 



mineralogical research. They have already afforded 

 innumerable fine examples of that important step in 

 science by which anomalies disappear, and occasional 

 incongruities become reconciled under more gene- 

 ral expressions of physical laws, and thus unite in 

 affording support to those very views which they pro- 

 mised, when first observed, to overset. Nothing, in- 

 deed, can be more striking than to see the very ingre- 

 dient which every previous chemist and mineralogist 

 would agree to disregard and reject as a mere 

 casual impurity brought forward and appealed to in 

 support of a theory expressly directed to the object 

 of rescuing science from the imputation of disre- 

 garding, under any circumstances, the plain results 

 of direct experiment. 



Chemistry. 



(332.) The laws which concern the intimate con- 

 stitution of bodies, not as respects their structure or 

 the manner in which their parts are put together, 

 but as regards their materials or the ingredients of 

 which those parts are composed, form the objects of 

 chemistry. A solid body may be regarded as a 

 fabric, more or less regularly and artificially con- 

 structed, in which the materials and the workman- 

 ship may be separately considered, and in which, 

 though the latter be ruined and confounded by 

 violence, the former remain unchanged in their 

 nature, though differently arranged. In liquid or 

 aerial bodies, too, though there prevails a less 

 degree of difference in point of structure, and a 

 greater facility of dispersion and dissipation, than in 

 solids, yet an equal diversity of materials subsists, 



