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SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XIV. No. 342. 



well establislied. That bj^ its application 

 to certain combinations of materials an ex- 

 plosive effect could be produced which over- 

 came the force of gravity had been discov- 

 ered three or four hundred years before 

 when gunpowder was invented, but that a 

 mechanical effect could be produced by the 

 use of heat was not understood, and the 

 nature of the phenomenon itself was not 

 comprehended. It was looked upon by 

 physicists as an ' element' or primary form 

 of matter, and in 1690 Stahl conceived the 

 idea of ' phlogiston,' an elementary sub- 

 stance, invisible and inappreciable by the 

 senses, which entered into the composition 

 of combustible substances, and which, by 

 the process of combustion, was separated 

 from them and passed oif in the form of 

 corpuscules which, striking the sensory 

 nerves, were perceived as heat. Sir Isaac 

 Newton espoused this phlogiston hypothe- 

 sis and also conceived that light was the 

 product of certain corpuscules which were 

 perceived by the optical nerves. The discus- 

 sion of these hypotheses occupied the atten- 

 tion of the philosophers for the whole of the 

 eighteenth century, and, in the meantime, 

 the physicists were busy experimenting on 

 the methods of utilizing the vapor into 

 which heat converted water. By degrees,the 

 steam engine was developed into a. practical 

 machine, capable of doing work which be- 

 fore could only be accomplished by animal 

 labor, and the engineer availed himself of 

 it in the handling of materials. But al- 

 though the chemists had been striving for 

 centuries to learn the composition of matter 

 and the means of transforming and combin- 

 ing its several natural conditions, they had 

 not, at the beginning of the nineteenth cen- 

 tury, learned how to produce either heat or 

 light, except by the aboriginal method of 

 striking flint aad steel together. In the 

 lack of knowledge of the properties of 

 these phenomena and the fact that they 

 could be utilized on a large scale, there was 



no occasion for the devotion of any special 

 class of men to their production and devel- 

 opment. There were two other classes of 

 phenomena which seemed as if they ought 

 to be controlled by man, but the laws of 

 which had so far eluded discovery — elec- 

 tricity and magnetism. So that, really, all 

 that the civil engineer had to deal with was 

 the force of gravity acting on such materials 

 as the earth yielded him, in their natural 

 state or as they could be modified by heat 

 and manual labor. 



But he had been making progress. In 

 Italy, where the first application of science 

 to construction had been made, the study 

 of the laws of hydraulic science had been 

 constantly pursued, and those laws applied 

 to the regulation of the rivers ; in France, 

 ever ready to grasp new ideas and to pursue 

 their application to practical results, the 

 principles of hydraulics had been studied 

 and applied to the construction of great 

 canals, and to the supply of water to Paris^ 

 where, in 1671, water was pumped by a. 

 water wheel driven by the current of the 

 Seine and distributed through cast-iron 

 pipes. In England, Hugh Myddelton had 

 supplied London with water, and, in 1638, 

 Nicholas Yermuyden had been called in 

 from Holland to protect the lands along the 

 Kiver Ouse from overflow, a task so well 

 accomplished that his work stood for a^ 

 hundred years, and only failed then from 

 lack of proper maintenance, the English 

 having by that time apparently concluded 

 that, as Dr. Franklin wrote in 1772, ' rivers 

 were unmanageable things,' and, inspired 

 by the success of the public waterways of 

 France, turned their attention to the con- 

 struction of canals and the improvement of 

 harbors. Many important works of this 

 class were built in England during the last 

 half of the eighteenth century. The men 

 by whom these works were constructed were 

 not educated men or men experienced in 

 scientific research. They certainly were 



