LVIII PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
With two short lessons cited to point the moral of this long story, 
and I have done. The first of these moralities shall” be a warning | 
against the folly of the old atomists in attempting to philosophize 
beyond the conditions of their knowledge. They reared imposing 
fabrics in astronomy, in physics, in psychology, and in anthropology, 
but they built without laying their foundation in any deep knowl- 
edge of nature, and laid the successive courses of their system- 
building in the untempered mortar of an incoherent logic. And 
the moral needs to be pointed as much for the admonition of modern 
scientific workers, with their cheap and easy cosmologies, as for the 
reproach of the old physiologers of Greece. One of our poets has 
sung: 
From an old English parsonage 
Down by the sea, 
There came in the twilight 
A message to me. 
Its quaint Saxon legend, 
Deeply engraven, 
Hath, as it seems to me, 
Teaching from heaven; 
And all through the hours 
The quiet words ring, 
Like a low inspiration, 
“Doe the nerte thyuge.” 
The message is as full of inspiration for guidance in physical 
philosophizing as for guidance in moral conduct. Tantwm series 
juncturaque pollet. 
The only other morality which time permits to be pointed at the 
end of this review is a warning against intellectual impatience— 
not that intellectual impatience rebuked by the maxim just cited, 
and which seeks to leap at a single bound the limitations of knowl- 
edge in any given age—but the intellectual impatience which cayils 
at the short-comings of the men who dug the first ditches and 
planted the first hedges around the vineyards of science. They 
were humble pioneers, but they opened the way into that land of 
Beulah where the men of science sit to-day beneath their own 
vines and fig-trees, with none to make them afraid. Even after 
John Dalton had come to place the key of the new Atomic Philoso- 
phy in the hands of men, it was a saying of Mitscherlich that it 
took fourteen years to discover and establish a single fact in 
