10 LIGHT SCIENCE FOR LEISURE HOURS. 



this work which, in my opinion, most strikingly indi- 

 cated the powers of Mrs Somerville's mind, I should 

 unhesitatingly select the preliminary dissertation. In 

 this we have an abstract of the Newtonian philosophy 

 such as none but a master-mind could have produced. 

 Apart from its scientific value and it has great scien- 

 tific value it is a work of great literary merit. If it 

 is not in plan and purpose altogether original, inas- 

 much as it must be regarded as to some degree an 

 abstract of Laplace's Systeme du Monde, it is never- 

 theless, as Herschel has well remarked, ' an abstract so 

 vivid and judicious as to have all the merit of origin- 

 ality, and such as could have been produced only by 

 one accustomed to large and general views, as well as 

 perfectly familiar with the particulars of the subject.' 



Three years after the appearance of the Mechanism 

 of the Heavens, Mrs. Sornerville published the work by 

 which she is probably best known to general readers. 

 The Connexion of the Physical Sciences was, I believe, 

 written at the suggestion of Lord Brougham, as an 

 expansion of the admirable introduction to the Celestial 

 Mechanism. It is a work full of interest, not only to 

 the student of advanced science, but to the general 

 reader. In saying this we indicate its chief merit and 

 its most marked defect. It is impossible to conceive 

 that any reader, no matter how advanced or how limited 

 his knowledge, could fail to find many most instructive 

 pages in this work; but it is equally impossible to 

 conceive that any one reader could find the whole work, 

 or even any considerable portion, instructive or useful. 



