76 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



British Association. We have here a body of men 

 engaged in the pursuit of Natural Knowledge, but vari- 

 ously engaged. While sympathising with each of its 

 departments, and supplementing his culture by knowl- 

 edge drawn from all of them, each student amongst us 

 selects one subject for the exercise of his own original 

 faculty one line, along which he may carry the light 

 of his private intelligence a little way into the darkness 

 by which all knowledge is surrounded. Thus, the 

 geologist deals with the rocks; the biologist with the 

 conditions and phenomena of life; the astronomer 

 with stellar masses and motions; the mathematician 

 with the relations of space and number; the chemist 

 pursues his atoms; while the physical investigator has 

 his own large field in optical, thermal, electrical, acous- 

 tical, and other phenomena. The British Association 

 then, as a whole, faces physical nature on all sides, and 

 pushes knowledge centrifugally outwards, the sum of 

 its labours constituting what Fichte might call the 

 sphere of natural knowledge. In the meetings of the 

 Association it is found necessary to resolve this sphere 

 into its component parts, which take concrete form 

 under the respective letters of our Sections. 



Mathematics and Physics have been long accus- 

 tomed to coalesce, and here they form a single section. 

 No matter how subtle a natural phenomenon may be, 

 whether we observe it in the region of sense, or follow 

 it into that of imagination, it is in the long run re- 

 ducible to mechanical laws. But the mechanical data 

 once guessed or given, mathematics are all-powerful 

 as an instrument of deduction. The command of 

 Geometry over the relations of space, and the far- 

 reaching power which Analysis confers, are potent both 

 as means of physical discovery, and of reaping the en- 

 tire fruits of discovery. Indeed, without mathematics, 



