Proceedings. 161 



so on. Materialist doctrines of this kind he speaks of 

 as monstrous nonsense of which Epicurus and Lucretius 

 would have been ashamed if they had possessed one-tenth 

 part of the exact knowledge available to the metaphysician 

 of the 19th century, and he fears that, just as the old 

 doctrines of imponderables had placed obstacles in the way 

 of scientific progress, so the new materialistic doctrines 

 will in their turn delay the development of new ideas. He 

 was strongly opposed to the popular habit of gauging the 

 merits of a discoverer merely by priority of dates, which he 

 maintains has turned the domain of science into the theatre 

 of a kind of steeplechase, with the result that not only 

 are works published in an immature state without 

 cohesion or pretence of completeness, but that, in con- 

 sequence, the numbers of those willing to read a well 

 considered and exhaustive memoir on any subject are 

 becoming smaller and smaller. Following Verdet, he 

 considers that the founder of a theory is not the author 

 from whose works a glimmering, more or less vague, 

 of the theory may be extracted, but he who is the first 

 to form a body of scientific doctrine out of what may 

 have previously been a vague hypothesis, and he evidently 

 assigns to Joule the chief merit in founding the mechanical 

 theory of heat. In accordance with the first of these views, 

 and in spite of an obvious bent towards metaphysical 

 reasoning, Hirn insists upon the experimental basis of the 

 mechanical theory of heat, and decries the idea of an a priori 

 demonstration as resting upon gratuitous assumptions or 

 upon arguments in a circle. If the principles and facts, to- 

 day so impregnable, are so evidently and naturally conse- 

 quences of an innate and axiomatic first principle, how is it, 

 he asks, that Rumford's and Davy's work bore no fruit, or 

 that Oersted advised Colding to be prudent and keep his 

 ideas and experiments in his desk or they would bring 

 their author into discredit and ridicule? In the same spirit, 



