ON IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 31 



the attempt to keep the axle of a wheel from heating when 

 the wheel turns around very fast? How useful for carters 

 and gig drivers to know something about this; and how 

 good were it, if any ingenious person would find out the 

 cause of such phenomena, and thence educe a general 

 remedy for them. Such an ingenious person was Count 

 Rumford; and he and his successors have landed us in the 

 theory of the persistence, or indestructibility, of force. And 

 in the infinitely minute, as in the infinitely great, the seekers 

 after natural knowledge of the kinds called physical and 

 chemical, have everywhere found a definite order and suc- 

 cession of events which seem never to be infringed. 



And how has it fared with "Physick" and Anatomy? 

 Have the anatomist, the physiologist, or the physician, 

 whose business it has been to devote themselves assiduously 

 to that eminently practical and direct end, the alleviation 

 of the sufferings of mankind, — have they been able to con- 

 fine their vision more absolutely to the strictly useful? I 

 fear they are the worst offenders of all. For if the astrono- 

 mer has set before us the infinite magnitude of space, and 

 the practical eternity of the duration of the universe; if the 

 physical and chemical philosophers have demonstrated 

 the infinite minuteness of its constituent parts, and the 

 practical eternity of matter and of force; and if both have 

 alike proclaimed the universality of a definite and predicable 

 order and succession of events, the workers in biology have 

 not only accepted all these, but have added more startling 

 theses of their own. For, as the astronomers discover in the 

 earth no centre of the universe, but an eccentric speck, so 

 the naturalists find man to be no centre of the living world, 

 but one amidst endless modifications of life; and as the 

 astronomer observes the mark of practically endless time 

 set upon the arrangements of the solar system so the student 



