376 Professor Owen's Address. 



Palaeontology ; the inventions and practical applications of Gas, 

 the Steam-engine, Photography, Telegraphy : — such, in the few 

 centuries since Bacon wrote, have heen the rewards of the faithful 

 followers of his rules of research. (He dwelt on the importance of 

 direct observations as illustrated in the history of Astronomy — 

 referred to the discovery of Galileo, the application of his discovery 

 hy Kepler and Horrocks, and continued.) Without stopping to 

 trace the concurrent progress of the science of motion, of which 

 the true foundatiens were laid, in Bacon's time, by Galileo, it will 

 serve here to state that the foundations were laid and the materi- 

 als gathered for the establishment 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 ' Philosophise Natu- 

 ralis Principia Mathematica' of Newton. Has time, it maybe 

 asked, in any way affected the great result of that masterpiece of 

 human intellect ? There are signs that even Newton's axiom is 

 not exempt from the restless law of progress. The mode of ex- 

 pressing the law 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 spherical surface over which it is 

 diffused, So indeed it was expressly understood by Halley. Prof. 

 Whew ell, the ablest historian of Natural Science, has remarked 

 that " future discoveries'may make gravitation a case of some 

 wider law, and may disclose something of the mode in which it 

 operates." The difficulty, indeed, of conceiving 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 principle 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 not to have possessed such an idea of the uncreateability 

 and indestructibility of force as that which, now possessed by 

 minds of the highest order, seems to some of them to be incom- 

 patible with the terms in which Newton enunciated his great law, 

 viz., of matter attracting matter with a force which varies inversely 

 as the square of the distance. The progress of knowledge of an- 



