Fresidcnt's Address. 195 



tioii of water. Ur JJeiijamiii Franklin's name should also 

 not be forgotten, by reason of his many learned and ingenious 

 works, and his curious experiments in electricity at this time. 



Lamarck, Jussieu, and Geoffrey St Hilaire, are names of 

 well-known French writers who deserve notice. Count 

 Eumford, an American by birth, should also receive a few 

 words. His experiments chiefly related to heat. He estab- 

 lished, for the first time, the fact of the unlimited production 

 of heat from a limited quantity of matter, by the expenditure 

 of mechanical power in friction, a fact subversive of the long 

 prevalent hypothesis of a subtle fluid as the cause of heat. 

 This fact seems to have given the first idea for the develop- 

 ment of the comparatively recent but now pretty generally 

 received doctrine of the " Conservation of Eneegy." Count 

 Eumford died in 1814. 



Many other distinguished names might be cited as having 

 flourished during the earlier period of this review, but the 

 foregoing representative men in physical science I tliink 

 sufficiently illustrative. 



If, as I have said, the chief writers at this time w^ere not 

 numerous, they were, at least, profound thinkers, were willing, 

 earnest workers, and their discoveries were all more or less of 

 an important and salient nature. 



The small number of works published may in some manner 

 be accounted for w^hen it is taken into consideration that 

 little encouragement was given to writers by publishers, who 

 were then a very limited class. JMost frequently authors 

 themselves had to undertake the expense of their books, and 

 thus run the entire risk of sometimes heavy loss. The truth 

 is, the people had not then acquired a taste for science. The 

 works, too, w^ere often published in ponderous and conse- 

 quently repulsive volumes. In those days there were no 

 little handy text-books nicely and profusely illustrated with 

 diagrams or pictures to tempt the uninitiated to drink at tlie 

 fountain of science. These little books now-a-days sown broad- 

 cast are seed producing abundant fruit, whetting the appetite 

 and gradually enabling the mind to appreciate and digest 

 treatises of a more abstruse and solid character. 



A word on the earlier metaphysicians. Descartes, j\[ale- 



