MODERN SCIENCE. 215 



in the sun, and he was rewarded by the discovery of five 

 such elements." 



It is hardly necessary to say anything about these magni- 

 ficent results. To state and marshal them is to point out 

 their grandeur. That man, in. his acknowledged insignifi- 

 cance and with his confessed limitation of intellect, should 

 have arrived at detecting, in the infinitude of space, innumer- 

 able phenomena, each of them a new sphere of further in- 

 vestigation, and after detecting them should have explained 

 their relation to one another, and after showing their relation 

 should have found out the far-reaching laws by which they 

 are regulated, is at once the most beautiful and the most en- 

 grossing of all wonders. That this is a subject for meditation 

 which precedes all others in importance, because of the 

 psychological questions it involves, need not be insisted upon, 

 so intuitively do we all feel it. Such was the work of modern 

 astronomers, the sublimest achievement of man, from Coper- 

 nicus who led the van to Norman Lockyer who closes the 

 march. From the survey of astronomy, we learn as forcibly 

 as in all else the one great lesson of modern knowledge the 

 government of the world by law. 



GROUP VI. PHYSICS. 



1608 1647. Torricelli, concurrently with Guericke, 

 showed that air has not only weight, but, at the earth's 

 surface, exerts an enormous pressure. By his invention of 

 the BAROMETER he demonstrated this fact, which had 

 apparently been understood by Hero of Alexandria witness 

 his fountain though not demonstrated. Torricelli by means 

 of his instrument showed that the whole atmosphere is equal 

 to the weight of an ocean of mercury covering the earth, and 

 about thirty inches in height : from which it follows that a 

 pressure of about fifteen pounds (or more correctly 14*6 Ibs.) 

 weighs on each square inch of the earth's surface, so that a 

 man of ordinary size bears a weight of about fifteen tons, but 

 as the pressure of that weight is distributed equally on all 

 sides it is unfelt just in the same manner as the weight of 



