PHYSICAL SCIENCE. 3 



the discoveries in which they originate, and by which they 

 are sanctioned. Modern science, in its dealings with the 

 great physical powers or elementary forces which pervade 

 the material world, has been led, or even forced, into a bolder 

 form and method of enquiry. Inductions of a higher class 

 have been reached, and generalisations attained, going far 

 beyond those subordinate laws in which science was formerly 

 satisfied to rest. Experiment and observation, as the agents 

 in acquiring knowledge, must always to a certain extent be 

 alike in their objects and methods of pursuit. But the pre- 

 cision and refinements of modern experiment partly due 

 to greater perfection of instruments, partly to the higher 

 principles on which enquiry is based strikingly distinguish 

 it from that of any anterior time. With every allowance for 

 illustrious exceptions, it is impossible to make the compa- 

 rison, and not to see that the physical researches of our own 

 day have a larger scope and more connected aim than hereto- 

 fore ; that experiment is no longer tentative merely, but 

 suggested by views which stretch beyond the immediate 

 result, and ever hold in sight those general laws which work 

 in the -universe at large. Nor is any power so gained 

 permitted to be dormant or inert. If thought suggests 

 experiment, experiment ministers fresh materials to thought ; 

 and the philosopher working boldly with the new forces at 

 his command, and under the guidance of hypotheses which 

 extend to the very confines of human intelligence, obtains 

 results which almost startle the imagination by the inroads 

 they seem to make on the mysteries beyond. When flying 

 along the railroad at forty or fifty miles an hour, with a 

 slender wire beside us, conveying, with speed scarcely measur- 

 able, the news of nations, the demands of commerce, or the 

 fates of war, we have an example (though few estimate it 

 fully) of those mighty attainments which bind to do our 

 bidding, elements before unknown or uncontrolled by man, 



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