INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 5 



tions are performed by the same means, the weight of the 

 atmosphere, and that a sea-horse climbs the ice-hills by no 

 other power. Can anything be more strange to contemplate ? 

 Is there in all the fairy tales that ever were fancied anything 

 more calculated to arrest the attention and to occupy and 

 to gratify the mind, than this most unexpected resemblance 

 between things so unlike to the eyes of ordinary beholders ? 

 A\ hat more pleasing occupation than to see uncovered and 

 bared before our eyes the very instrument and the process by 

 which Nature works ? Then we raise our views to the struc- 

 ture of the heavens ; and are again gratified with tracing accu- 

 rate but most unexpected resemblances. Is it not in the highest 

 degree interesting to find, that the power which keeps this earth 

 in its shape, and in its path, wheeling upon its axis and round 

 the sun, extends over all the other worlds that compose the 

 universe, and gives to each its proper place and motion ; that 

 this same power keeps the moon in her path round our earth, 

 and our earth in its path round the sun, and each planet in 

 its path ; that the same power causes the tides upon our 

 globe, and the peculiar form of the globe itself; and that, 

 after all, it is the same power which makes a stone fall to the 

 ground ? To learn these things, and to reflect upon them, 

 occupies the faculties, fills the mind, and produces certain as 

 well as pure gratification. 



But if the knowledge of the doctrines unfolded by science 

 is pleasing, so is the being able to trace the steps by which 

 those doctrines are investigated, and their truth demon- 

 strated : indeed you cannot be said, in any sense of the word, 

 to have learnt them, or to know them, if you have not so 

 studied them as to perceive how they are proved. Without 

 this you never can expect to remember them long, or to 

 understand them accurately ; and that would of itself be 

 reason enough for examining closely the grounds they rest 

 on. But there is the highest gratification of all, in being able 

 to see distinctly those grounds, so as to be satisfied that a be- 

 lief in the doctrines is well founded. Hence to follow a 

 demonstration of a great mathematical truth to perceive 



