THE TECHNOLOGIST. [Sept. 1, 1864. 



76 ON THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES WHICH FORM 



example, of metallurgy, with its minings and diggings, its crushings and 

 sortings, its sittings and washings, which are all processes of analysis 

 and isolation, makes no such impression on us as the chemical part of 

 metallurgy, where the blast-furnace resolves iron ore into oxygen and 

 iron ; and the clay-still resolves cinnabar into quicksilver and sulphur ; 

 and the cupel extracts silver from a mixture of metals. The greater 

 impressiveness of chemical as compared with mechanical analysis 

 largely depends upon the great rapidity with which the former can be 

 executed, and its results rendered visible. You let fall a drop of oil on 

 the liquid chloride of nitrogen, and on the instant it is resolved into its 

 component gases. You strike a fulminating crystal, or heat a lock of 

 gun-cotton, and in a moment every element in either is set free. You 

 expose a salt of silver for a second to the sun, and silver appears. You 

 add a little green vitriol to a solution of gold, and the gold is at once 

 deposited. You plunge the poles of a galvanic battery into water, and 

 torrents of hydrogen and oxygen instantly rise from the liquid. No 

 science but chemistry can show such things ; and if the practical 

 chemist does not analyse quite so swiftly as such feats would imply that 

 he might, he nevertheless always analyses swiftly. But skill to analyse 

 forms, as we have seen, but one-fourth part of the chemist's power. He 

 can build up as well as pull down ; he can do both at once, and he can 

 transmute without doing either, and all as swiftly as he analyses. This 

 fourfold power and this immense energy place chemistry at the head of 

 the experimental transformational sciences, and render it as an art so 

 mighty in effecting useful changes upon matter. It is the type of the 

 one group of industrial sciences, as astronomy is of the other. 



Astronomy is severely obseivational as a science, and passively 

 registrative as an art. At best it lifts up its hand only to warn, and 

 stretches, forth its finger only to point. Chemistry is inquisi tonally 

 scrutinising as a science, and actively changeful as an art. It lays its 

 hand upon everything within its reach, and is never content till it has 

 made some alteration upon it. The symbol, accordingly, of astronomy 

 is an eye ; the symbol of chemistry is a hand : not that astronomy is 

 handless, or chemistry eyeless, but the power of the former is in its 

 eye ; the power of the latter is in its hand. The symbol of industrial 

 science is a hand with an eye in the palm, and the fingers free. Let this 

 be the crest of the Industrial Museum. 



The other physical sciences rank between those two, standing nearer 

 to the one or the other, as they are predominantly observational or 

 experimental. Nearest to astronomy stands geology. The magnitude of 

 the objects with which it deals, small though they are compared with 

 those which concern astronomy, places them in greater part beyond 

 human interference. And the same influence which illimitable space 

 exerts in astronomy, by lifting the stars to heights inaccessible by us, 

 immeasurable time exerts in geology, by enlarging her almanac, so that 



