THE TECHNOLOGIST. [Sept. 1, 1864. 



OS ON THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES WHICH FORM 



machines and apparatus which, within certain wide limits, we can wield 

 at will. 



Such, then, is the scientific "basis of industrialism, a platform broad 

 as the whole earth, and reaching even to the stars. Although to biology 

 we give a special place, because it deals with the inscrutable mystery of 

 life, yet after all we can find room for it in the twofold division of 

 physical sciences which arranges them, as each in part passively obser- 

 vational, in part actively transformational. Our whole work, as 

 industrialists, resolves itself into observing and transforming, and 

 whether we labour as observers or transformers, we have noble work to 

 do. In either case, an edifice rises before us as the fruit and memorial 

 of our labour. In the one case, this edifice is like a Nineveh recovered 

 from oblivion ; in the other it is like a Ciystal Palace, for the first time 

 given to the world. When we work as naturalists, though we do no 

 more than bring into view objects which, from the moment of their 

 creation, have been within reach of our senses, we are, nevertheless, like 

 those skilful excavators who read a new lesson to the modern world, 

 when they recovered to the light of day the long-buried and forgotten 

 wonders of Herculaneuni and Pompeii ; or like those unwearied ex- 

 plorers who displaced the sand under which Egyptian temples had been 

 concealing, untarnished and unworn, the paintings and sculptures 

 bestowed upon them centuries before. The same kind of interest which 

 attaches to Belzoni, Denon, and Lepsius, as uncoverers of the sand- 

 hidden pyramids and sphinxes of Egypt ; and to Young, Champollion, 

 Rossellini, and others, as decipherers of the hieroglyphics upon them ; 

 or to Layard, as a reveal er of the disinterred wonders of Babylon and 

 Nineveh ; and to Rawlinson, as an interpreter of the Cuneiform inscrip- 

 tions upon their buildings ; attaches to the naturalists of all classes. 

 The most ancient book, it has been finely said, is published to-day for 

 him who reads it for the first time. Herculaneuni, Thebes, and Nineveh 

 were as great novelties on the day of their re-discovering as if they had 

 been cities of the Mormons, built yesterday. Hieroglyphics and 

 Cuneatics are, for the novice who encounters them, marvels as astound- 

 ing as the new language can be, which a tribe of native Africans are 

 asserted (i fear' on doubtful authority) to have recently constructed for 

 themselves. And so, although Galileo only discovered the moons of 

 Jupiter, we often and unconsciously think of him as if he had been 

 their creator, and had first set them to play their untiring game of hide- 

 and-seek round the stately planet ; and so also in no irreverent spirit 

 we call the laws which Kepler divined to regulate certain movements of 

 the heavenly bodies, " Kepler's Laws," although he disclaimed the title, 

 grandly affirming that God, whose laws they were, had waited some 

 thousand years before one man, even Kepler, had discerned them. And 

 60 again, notwithstanding our conviction that the star Neptune has been 

 shining in the sky since what I shall be content to call " the beginning," 



