Curiosities of Science. 



element of a philosophical education, fitted to lead men to the know- 

 ledge of real existences and of the supreme good. Here he describes 

 dialectic by its objects and purpose. In other places dialectic is spoken 

 of as a method or process of analysis ; as in the Pkcedrus, where Socrates 

 describes a good dialectician as one who can divide a subject according 

 to its natural members, and not miss the joint, like a bad carver. 

 Xenophon says that Socrates derived dialectic from a term implying 

 to divide a subject into parts, which Mr. Grote thinks unsatisfactory as 

 an etymology, but which has indicated a practical connection in the 

 Socratic school. The result seems to be that Plato did not establish 

 any method of analysis of a subject as his dialectic ; but he conceived 

 that the analytical habits formed by the comprehensive study of the 

 exact sciences, and sharpened by the practice of dialogue, would lead 

 his students to the knowledge of first principles. Dr. Whewell. 



FOLLY OF ATHEISM. 



Morphology, in natural science, teaches us that the whole 

 animal and vegetable creation is formed upon certain funda- 

 mental types and patterns, which can be traced under various 

 modifications and transformations through all the rich variety 

 of things apparently of most dissimilar build. But here and 

 there a scientific person takes it into his foolish head that there 

 may be a set of moulds without a moulder, a calculated grada- 

 tion of forms without a calculator, an ordered world without 

 an ordering God. Now, this atheistical science conveys about 

 as much meaning as suicidal life : for science is possible only 

 where there are ideas, and ideas are only possible where there 

 is mind, and minds are the offspring of God ; and atheism 

 itself is not merely ignorance and stupidity, it is the purely 

 nonsensical and the unintelligible. ProfessorBlackie; Edin- 

 burgh Essays, 1856. 



THE ART OF OBSERVATION. 



To observe properly in the very simplest of the physical 

 sciences requires a long and severe training. No one knows 

 this so feelingly as the great discoverer. Faraday once said, 

 that he always doubts his own observations. Mitscherlich on 

 one occasion remarked to a man of science that it takes 

 fourteen years to discover and establish a single new fact in 

 chemistry. An enthusiastic student one day betook himself to 

 Baron Cuvier with the exhibition of a new organ a muscle 

 which he supposed himself to have discovered in the body of 

 some living creature or other ; but the experienced and saga- 

 cious naturalist kindly bade the young man return to him with 

 the same discovery in six months. The Baron would not even 

 listen to the student's demonstration, nor examine his dissec- 

 tion, till the eager and youthful discoverer had hung over the 

 object of inquiry for half a year ; and yet that object was a 

 mere thing of the senses. North-British Review, No. 18. 



