2o6 



NATURE 



[July 6, 1876 



needs no leading in this matter, though it certainly 

 does need, encouragement to take under its wing a 

 science museum and laboratory. This then it seems to 

 us ought to be the first care of the Commissioners, 

 leaving the examination rooms out of the reckoning, 

 while the library can easily afford to wait for future con- 

 sideration. If the idea of a library is brought too 

 prominently to the front, we fear the building will come 

 to be known by this and no other name, and come in the 

 end to be mainly, if not only, what its name purports. 

 We believe the Commissioners could spare 100,000/. for 

 a Science Museum ; and we are sure the great success 

 which has attended the Loan Collection will tend to con- 

 firm them in their intentions, and induce them without 

 delay to set about providing a permanent successor. We 

 have no doubt that the Commissioners are quite alive to 

 the value of a Physical Science Museum and Laboratory, 

 and feel strongly the great need there is in this country 

 for such an institution. They have on the whole done 

 their work conscientiously and well, and South Kensington 

 testifies to the highly important and beneficial results 

 which they have accomplished. By erecting an insti- 

 tution for the promotion of physical science, they will 

 show their anxiety to make their work complete in all the 

 departments with which they have had to deal. Twenty 

 years ago they started the Museum of Art at Kensington ; if 

 twenty years hence a Museum of Science has made equal 

 progress, the nation will have reason to congratulate itself 

 on the result, and be grateful to the Commissioners for 

 the faithfulness with which they have done their work. 



WHEWELLS WRITINGS AND CORRE- 

 SPONDENCE 

 William Whewell, D.D., Master 0/ Trinity College, Cam- 

 bridge. An Account of his Writings, with Selections from 

 his Literary and Scientific Correspondence. By L Tod- 

 hunter, M.A., F.R.S., Honorary Fellow of St. John's 

 College. (London ; Macmillan and Co., 1876.) 



WE frequently hear the complaint that as the 

 boundaries of science are widened its cultivators 

 become less of philosophers and more of specialists, each 

 confining himself with increasing exclusiveness to the 

 area with which he is familiar. This is probably an 

 inevitable result of the development of science, which has 

 made it impossible for any one man to acquire a thorough 

 knowledge of the whole, while each of its sub-divisions 

 is now large enough to afford occupation for the useful 

 work of a lifetime. The ablest cultivators of science are 

 agreed that the student, in order to make the most of his 

 powers, should ascertain in what field of science these 

 powers are most available, and that he should then con- 

 fine his investigations to this field, making use of otb er 

 parts of science only in so far as they bear upon his 

 special subject. 



Accordingly we find that Dr. Whewell, in his article in 

 the " Encycloptedia Metropolitana," on " Archimedes and 

 Greek Mathematics," says of Eratosthenes, who, like him- 

 self, was philologer, geometer, astronomer, poet, and anti- 

 quary : " It is seldom that one person attempts to master 

 so many subjects without incurring the charge and per- 

 haps the danger of being superficial." 



It is probably on account of the number and diversity 



of the kinds of intellectual work in which Dr. Whewell 

 attained eminence that his name is most widely known. Of 

 his actual performances the "History "and the "Philosophy 

 of the Inductive Sciences " are the most characteristic, and 

 this because his practical acquaintance with a certain 

 part of his great subject enabled him the better to deal 

 with those parts which he had studied only in books, and 

 to describe their relations in a more intelligent manner 

 than those authors who have devoted themselves entirely 

 to the general aspect of human knowledge without being 

 actual workers in any particular department of it. 



But the chief characteristic of Dr. Whewell's intel- 

 lectual life seems to have been the energy and persever- 

 ance with which he pursued the development of each of 

 the great ideas which had in the course of his life pre- 

 sented itself to him. Of these ideas some might be 

 greater than others, but all were large. 



The special 'pursuit, therefore, to which he devoted 

 himself was the elaboration and the expression of the 

 ideas appropriate to different branches of knowledge. 

 The discovery of a new fact, the invention of a theory, 

 the solution of a problem, the filling up of a gap in an 

 existing science, were interesting to him not so much for 

 their own sake as additions to the general stock of know- 

 ledge, as for their illustrative value as characteristic in- 

 stances of the processes by which all human knowledge 

 is developed. 



To watch the first germ of an appropriate idea as it 

 was developed either in his own mind or in the writings 

 of the founders of the sciences, to frame appropriate and 

 scientific words in which the idea might be expressed, 

 and then to construct a treatise in which the idea should be 

 largely developed and the appropriate words copiously 

 exemplified— such seems to have been the natural channel 

 of his intellectual activity in whatever direction it over- 

 flowed. When any of his great works had reached this 

 stage he prepared himself for some other labour, and if new 

 editions of his work were called for, the alterations which 

 he introduced often rather tended to destroy than to com- 

 plete the unity of the original plan. 



Mr. Todhunter has given us an exhaustive account of 

 Dr. Whewell's writings and scientific work, and in this we 

 may easily trace the leading ideas which he successively 

 inculcated as a writer. We can only share Mr. Tod- 

 hunter's regret that it is only as a writer that he appears 

 in this book, and it is to be hoped that the promised 

 account of his complete life as a man may enable us to 

 form a fuller conception of the individuality and unity of his 

 character, which it is hard to gather from the multifarious 

 collection of his books. 



Dr. Whewell first appears before us as the author of a 

 long series of text-books on Mechanics. His position as 

 a tutor of his College, and the interest which he took in 

 University education, may have induced him to spend 

 more time in the composition of elementary treatises than 

 would otherwise have been congenial to him, but in the 

 prefaces to the different editions, as well as in the intro- 

 ductory chapters of each treatise, he shows that sense of 

 the intellectual and educational value of the study of first 

 principles which distinguishes all his writings. It is 

 manifest from his other writings, that the composition of 

 these text-books, involving as it did a thorough study of 

 the fundamental science of Dynamics, was a most appro- 



