72 Invention stopped by insufficiency of knowledge. 



the greatest thinkers, would be saved by such a dis- 

 covery. The curative arts also are permeated with 

 empiricism, and thousands of lives of persons of all 

 classes of society, are annually lost in this country 

 through want of a more perfect scientific basis of 

 medicine, attainable only by means of experiment 

 and observation. 



In this country, such great practical results have been 

 obtained by means of invention, that many persons 

 suppose a sufficiency of inventive skill will enable us 

 to effect every possible scientific object, and are sur- 

 prised that no one can invent a plan of utilising the 

 ^entire heat of coals, or a mode of overcoming the 

 sewage difficulty, or prevent the great leakage of coal 

 gas, or arrest epidemics, or produce a steam engine 

 which shall work without waste of power. The 

 progress of invention however depends upon that 

 -of discovery, and these various inventions, etc., 

 wanted by manufacturers and others probably cannot 

 be perfected until suitable new knowledge is found. 

 Every new invention has its own appropriate dis- 

 coveries, by means of which alone it can be perfected ; 

 -it was not possible to perfect the idea of an electric 

 telegraph before the discoveries of Volta and Oersted 

 were made. According to scientific laws, out of every- 

 thing proceeds everything, and out of nothing, nothing 

 .can come, even ideas are not created. An unlimited 

 number of inventions cannot be made by means of a 

 limited amount of scientific knowledge ; and our 

 ^present stock of such information applicable to inven- 



