xxiv KANT'S UNIVERSAL NATURAL HISTORY 



theory. 1 To Professor Huxley the merit must be 

 assigned of being the first English scientist who 

 clearly understood and adequately appreciated 

 Kant's Cosmogony as in the original German ; 

 but he still writes of it as ' seemingly little known.' 

 In his Essay on Geological Reform, published in 

 1869, he writes: 'The sort of geological specu- 

 lation to which I am now referring (geological 

 aetiology, in short) was created as a science by 

 that famous philosopher, Immanuel Kant, when, 

 in 1775 [1755], he wrote his General Natural 

 History and Theory of the Celestial Bodies; or, 

 an Attempt to Account for the Constitutional and 

 Mechanical Origin of the Universe, upon Newtonian 

 Principles. In this very remarkable but seemingly 

 little known treatise, Kant expounds a complete 

 Cosmogony in the shape of a Theory of the Causes 

 which have led to a development of the universe 

 from different atoms of matter, endowed with simple 

 attractive and repulsive forces.' 2 A still greater 

 master of physics, Lord Kelvin, shortly afterwards 

 declared that Kant's treatise only wanted the 

 knowledge of thermodynamics ' to lead to a 

 thoroughly definite explanation of all that is known 

 regarding the present actions and temperatures of 

 the sun.' 3 Lord Kelvin and Professor Tait, hand 



1 ' The substance of every planet in passing through its stages of 

 nebulous ring, gaseous spheroid,' etc. 5th ed., p. 318 (1887). 



2 Huxley's Collected Essays, Vol. vin., p. 320-1. 



3 Address to Geol. Society, Glasgow, April 5, 1869. 



