CHARLES B. WARRING, PH.D. 221 



diet one another. If they seem to do so, we know that 

 the contradiction is only apparent. In some way it can 

 be explained. A cork in water goes up, and a stone 

 goes down, an apparent contradiction which the school- 

 men sought to reconcile by saying that the cork had an 

 inherent principle of levity, while the stone had a natural 

 downward tendency, we now explain it very differently, 

 but the facts remain and the contradiction has ceased. 



Facts are stubborn things; nothing can make them give 

 way. The best made theory goes down when squarely 

 contradicted by a single one. The phlogistic theory of 

 combustion, apparently so sensible, for everybody could 

 see that the lire came out of the burning body, was re- 

 futed by the fact, which was at length discovered, that 

 the products of combustion weighed more than the sub- 

 stance burned. Not very long ago, everybody — every- 

 body who desired to have any standing, as a man of 

 scientific knowledge — believed that heat, or caloric, as it 

 was called, was an imponderable fluid residing in the 

 space between the molecules of bodies, which, when by 

 any means it was forced out, caused a rise in tempera- 

 ture. If so, it was readily seen that the amount of 

 caloric in a body was limited, because the vacant space 

 or interstices, were limited in size. When Count Rum- 

 ford showed by his celebrated but long undervalued ex- 

 periment of rubbing two bodies together, that the 

 amount of heat produced has no limits, but continues to 

 come in undiminished quantities, so long as the friction 

 continues, the theory met a fact tjiat could not be got 

 out of its way, and the theory, though tenacious of life, 

 was obliged to succumb. 



In all cases it is only the theory that comes to grief. 

 Every fact remains as it was. Some supposed facts per- 

 haps have been shown not to be facts ; some new ones 

 have been added, but as to all that was fact before, 

 everything in them and in their relation to each other, 



177 



