All natural laws are mysterious when an attempt is made 

 to trace them to their real cause. " It is the office of 

 science," says Bacon, " to shorten the long turnings and 

 windings of experience." It is also the office of science 

 to interpret the " how ;" but the "why " is inscrutable and 

 far beyond the powers of her revelation. As an anonymous 

 writer has well said : " Gravity is a mystery of mysteries 

 to the astronomer, and has almost compelled us to believe 

 in that ' action at a distance ' which Newton asserted to be 

 unimaginable by anyone with a competent power of reason- 

 ing about things philosophical. The ultimate cause of chemi- 

 cal changes is as great a mystery now as it was when the 

 four elements were believed in. And the nature of the ether 

 itself, in which the undulations of heat, light, and electricity 

 are transmitted, is utterly mysterious, even to those 

 students of science who have been most successful in 

 determining the laws according to which the undulations 

 proceed. But the phenomena themselves, being at once 

 referable (in our own time, at least) to law, have no longer 

 the mysterious, and in a sense miraculous, character recog- 

 nised in them before the laws of motion, of chemical affinity, 

 of light, and heat, and electricity had been ascertained." 

 It has been said that all our scientific knowledge, however 

 coherent, however solid and fruitful in results, is like a gold 

 chain of which we do not see the first link. Science regards 

 each link in the chain of phenomena, records the facts, and 

 interprets the power and purpose of each succeeding link. 

 By analysis and synthesis, by induction and deduction, she 

 groups the facts and phenomena into laws, and by the 

 grouping of laws reveals the wonders of the universe ; and 

 thus, as Mivart says, " Our appreciation and comprehension 

 of the world around us is but a continued repetition, on an 



