102 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



without the aid of which Newton would never have invented flux- 

 ions, nor Davy have decomposed the earths and alkalies, nor 

 would Columbus have found another Continent.' 1 Address to the 

 Royal Society by its President Sir Benjamin Brodie, November 

 30, 1859. 



I CARRIED with me to the Alps this year the bur- 

 den of this evening's work. Save from memory 

 I had no direct aid upon the mountains; but to spur 

 up the emotions, on which so much depends, as well as 

 to nourish indirectly the intellect and will, I took with 

 me four works, comprising two volumes of poetry, 

 Goethe's ' Farbenlehre/ and the work on ' Logic ' 

 recently published by Mr. Alexander Bain. In Goethe, 

 so noble otherwise, I chiefly noticed the self-inflicted 

 hurts of genius, as it broke itself in vain against the 

 philosophy of Newton. Mr. Bain I found, for the most 

 part, learned and practical, shining generally with a 

 dry light, but exhibiting at times a flush of emotional 

 strength, which proved that even logicians share the 

 common fire of humanity. He interested me most 

 when he became the mirror of my own condition. 

 Neither intellectually nor socially is it good for man 

 to be alone, and the sorrows of thought are more pa- 

 tiently borne when we find that they have been ex- 

 perienced by another. From certain passages in his 

 book I could infer that Mr. Bain was no stranger to 

 such sorrows. Speaking for example of the ebb of 

 intellectual force, which we all from time to time ex- 

 perience, Mr. Bain says: 'The uncertainty where to 

 look for the next opening of discovery brings the pain 

 of conflict and the debility of indecision/ These 

 words have in them the true ring of personal experi- 

 ence. The action of the investigator is periodic. He 

 grapples with a subject of enquiry, wrestles with it, 

 and exhausts, it may be, both himself and it for the 



