328 



SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT. 



17. 



Insuffici- 



18. 



Practical 

 interest. 



nature, the greatest devotion of the observer and the 

 - collector, lead only a little way in finding out the hidden 

 paths of natural things or the behaviour of natural ob- 

 jects ; and however grateful we must be to those pioneers 

 of knowledge who with unrewarded patience amass the 

 material for later theorists, it is to the classification of a 

 Linnaeus, to the arrangements of a Cuvier, to the theories 

 of a Darwin, to the measurements of a Bradley and a 

 Herschel, most of all to the formulae of a Newton or a 

 Gauss, followed by the calculations of their pupils, that 

 we are indebted for a real grasp, for a comprehensive 

 knowledge, of great masses of natural phenomena. 



Next to the pure love of nature, the desire to apply 

 natural knowledge, and to make it useful for practical 

 purposes, has rendered in return great services to science. 

 The Eoyal Society and the Eoyal Institution had both 

 from their infancy a large admixture of the practical 

 spirit. These were founded, more even than the academies 

 abroad, to a great extent upon the desire to make know- 

 ledge useful. 



The Governments of England and of France promoted 



lar fables which are only to be pitied ! 

 What can I add to such a protocol ? 

 The philosophical reader will him- 

 self suggest what to say when he 

 reads this authentic proof of an 

 evidently wrong fact, of a pheno- 

 menon which is physically impos- 

 sible" (Wolf, ' Geschichte der Astro - 

 nomie,' 1877, p. 697 sq.) Chladni 

 published his essay on the large 

 mass of iron found by the traveller 

 Pallas in Siberia in the year 1794, 

 and, in spite of adverse criticisms, 

 followed it up by a catalogue and 

 an atlas of meteoric stones, sug- 

 gesting that they were of cosmic 



origin. Fortunately, a remarkable 

 fall of stones, accompanied by 

 meteoric phenomena, took place in 

 1803 not far from Paris, at 1'Aigle 

 in the department de 1'Orne, and 

 Biot was commissioned by the 

 Academy to proceed to the dis- 

 trict and examine the case. In the 

 ' Relation,' &c., which he read before 

 the Institute, he established the 

 fact that a meteor exploded in the 

 district, and that at the same time 

 a fall of many thousand stones, 

 weighing about 20 tons, took place 

 (Biot, ' Melanges scientifiques et 

 litte'raires,' vol. i. p. 15 sqq.) 



