314 SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT. 



and Thomson approached the subject with mathematical 

 analysis and calculated the properties of vortex motion. 

 Heraclitus proclaimed, six hundred years before the 

 Christian era, the theory that everything moves or flows ; 

 but not till this century was the attempt made to work 

 out the definite hypothesis of Daniel Bernoulli, and 

 to explain the properties of bodies, apparently at rest 

 the pressure of gases, or the phenomena of elasticity 

 by assuming a hidden motion of the imperceptible portions 

 of matter. The same fate of lying dormant for ages at- 

 9. taches to the suggestive ideas of many thinkers. In every 



Mathemati- . 



cai spirit, case the awakening touch has been the mathematical 

 spirit, the attempt to count, to measure, or to calculate. 

 "What to the poet or the seer may appear to be the 

 very death of all his poetry and all his visions the cold 

 touch of the calculating mind, this has proved to be the 

 spell by which knowledge has been born, by which new 

 sciences have been created, and hundreds of definite prob- 

 lems put before the minds and into the hands of diligent 

 students. It is the geometrical figure, the dry algebraical 

 formula, which transforms the vague reasoning of the 

 philosopher into a tangible and manageable conception; 

 which represents, though it does not fully describe, which 

 corresponds to, though it does not explain, the things and 

 processes of nature : this clothes the fruitful, but other- 

 wise indefinite, ideas in such a form that the strict logical 

 methods of thought can be applied, that the human mind 

 can in its inner chamber evolve a train of reasoning the 

 result of which corresponds to the phenomena of the outer 

 world. By such processes did Gauss and Leverrier suc- 

 ceed in tracing the lines in the heavens on which invisible 



