I-OR THE ADYANCEMENT OF SCIElfCE. 65 



the Kno-wledge of Causes and Secret Motions of Things ; and enlarging of the bounds 

 of Human Empire to the effecting of all things possible." As one important means 

 of effecting the great aims of Bacon's " six days' college," certain of its members 

 were deputed, as " merchants of light," to make " circuits or visits of divers prin- 

 cipal cities of the kingdom." This latter feature of the Baconian organization is 

 the chief characteristic of the " British Association ;" but "we have striven to carry 

 out other aims of the ' 'New Atlantis,' such as the systematic summaries of the results 

 of different branches of science, of ■which our published volumes of ' Reports' are evi- 

 dence ; and we have likewise realized, in some measure, the idea of the " Mathemati- 

 cal House" in our establishment at Kew. The national and private observatories 

 the Royal and other Scientific Societies, the British Museum, the Zoological, Botan- 

 ical, and Horticultural Gardens, combine in our day to realize that which Bacon 

 foresaw in distant perspective. Great, beyond all anticipation, have been the re- 

 sults of this organization, and of the application of the inductive methods of inter- 

 rogating nature. The universal law of gravitation, the circulation of the blood, the 

 analogous course of the magnetic influence, which may be said to vivify the earth, 

 permitting no atom of its most solid constituents to stagnate in total rest ; the de- 

 velopment and progress of Chemistry, Geology, Palceontology ; the inventions and 

 practical applications of Gas, the Steam-engine, Photography, Telegraphy: such, 

 in the few centuries since Bacon wrote, have been the rewards of the faithful fol- 

 lowers of his rules of research. After dwelling on the importance of direct obser- 

 vation as ilhistrated in the history of Astronomy, he referred to the discovery of 

 Gahleo, the application of his discovery by Kepler and Horrocks, and continued — 

 Without stopping to trace the concurrent progress of the science of motion, of 

 which the true foundations were laid, in Bacon's time, by Galileo, it will serve here 

 to state that the foundations were laid and the materials gathered for the establish- 

 ment by a master-mind, supreme in vigour of thought and mathematical resource, 

 of the grandest generalization ever promulgated by science — that of the universal 

 gravitation of matter according to the law of the inverse square of the distance. 

 The same century in which the 'Thema Cceli' of Lord Verulam and the 'Nuncius 

 Sidereus ' of Galileo saw the light, was glorified by the publication of the ' Phi- 

 losophise Naturalis Fiincipia Mathematica' of Newton. Has time, it maybe asked, 

 in any way affected the great result of that masterpiece of human intellect ? These 

 are signs that even Newton's axiom is not exempt from the restless law of progress. 

 The mode of expressing the lav? of gravitation as being "in the inverse proportion 

 of the square of the distances" involves the idea that the force emanating from or 

 exercised by the sun must become more feeble in proportion to the increased sphe- 

 rical surface over whicli it is diffused. So indeed it was expressly understood by 

 Haliey. Prof. Whewell, the ablest historian of Natural Science, has remarked that 

 ' future discoveries may make gravitation a case of some wider law, and may dis- 

 close something of the mode in which it operates." The difficulty, indeed, of con- 

 ceiving a force acting through nothing from body to body has of late made itself 

 felt; and more especially since Meyer of Heilbronn first clearly expressed the prin- 

 ciple of the "conservation of force." Newton, though apprehending the necessity 

 of a medium by which the force of gravitation should be conveyed from one body 

 to another, yet appears nob to have possessed such an idea of the uncrealeability 

 VOL. IV. F 



