[491] 



ON THE CONSERVATION OF ENERGY AND 

 THE NATURE OF FORCE. 



Bt JOHN GALBRAITH, Esq., M.A., C.E., Port Hope, Ontario. 



Read before the Canadian Institute, March 17th, 1877. 



The progress of scientific investigation has led to the discovery of 

 innumerable laws by which the modes of material action are governed, 

 and to which the various phenomena of the physical universe are 

 referred. Having given certain observed facts and one or more of 

 these natural laws as premises, we can, by a mere logical process, 

 infer the resulting phenomena, the constant agreement of inferences 

 thus drawn with observation affording accumulating evidence as to 

 the truth of the laws. 



Nevertheless, these laws are mysterious; and although we feel 

 certain of their truth, there are many of us who cannot feel satisfied 

 until we have discovered how and why they are as they are. 



There is a space not yet bridged over between what are generally 

 considered the necessary or essential properties of matter and its 

 various laws of action. For instance, the ideas of form, extension 

 in three dimensions, impenetrability and mass, seem to be properties 

 without which we cannot conceive a material body to exist ; but it 

 is quite otherwise with gravity, or the various attractions and repul- 

 sions manifested in chemical and electrical phenomena. The fields 

 open to science cannot be considered as fully explored until these 

 laws have been shown to be necessary consequences ; that is to say, 

 logical deductions from the essential properties of matter, and some 

 hypothesis as to the arrangement of matter. 



The scientific world is at present divided into two great classes in 

 regard to the nature of the action of matter on matter. One of these 

 is content to rest with the assumption that it is possible for one body 

 to affect the motion of another at a distance, according to the observed 



