Z INTEODUCTOEY REMAKKS. 



a steam-boat but for excursions of curiosity or of amusement ? 

 Would it not be so if steam-engines had never been used but 

 in the fine arts ? So a microscope is a useful practical appli- 

 cation of optical science as well as a telescope and a tele- 

 scope would be so, although it were only used in examining 

 distant views for our amusement, or in showing us the real 

 figures of the planets, and were of no use in navigation or in 

 war. The mere pleasure, then, of tracing relations, and of 

 contemplating general laws in the material, the moral, and the 

 political world, is the direct and legitimate value of science ; 

 and all scientific truths are important for, this reason, whether 

 they ever lend any aid to the common arts of life or no. In 

 like manner the mental gratification afforded by the scientific 

 contemplations of Natural Eeligion are of great value, inde- 

 pendent of their much higher virtue in elevating the mind, 

 mending the heart, and improving the life, towards which 

 important object, indeed, all contemplations of science more 

 or less directly tend, and in this higher sense all the pleasures 

 of science are justly considered as its Practical Uses. 



If it be a pleasure to gratify curiosity, to know what we were 

 ignorant of, to have our feelings of wonder called forth, how 

 pure a delight of this very kind does Natural Science hold out 

 to its students ! Eecollect some of the extraordinary dis- 

 coveries of Mechanical Philosophy. How wonderful are the 

 laws that regulate the motions of fluids ! Is there anything 

 in all the idle books of tales and horrors more truly astonish- 

 ing than the fact, that a few pounds of water may, by mere 

 pressure, without any machineiy by merely being placed in 

 a particular way, produce an irresistible force ? What can 

 be more strange, than that an ounce weight should balance 

 hundreds of pounds, by the intervention of a few bars of 

 thin iron ? Observe the extraoi'dinary truths which Optical 

 Science discloses. Can anything surprise us more, than to 

 find that the colour of white is a mixture of all others that 

 red, and blue, and green, and all the rest, merely by being 

 blended in certain proportions, form what we had fancied 

 rather to be no colour at all, than all colours together? 



