614 ADDRESS OF PROFESSOR LOVERING. 
iently comprehensive to subject these data to calculation, would 
include in the same formula the movements of the largest bodies 
of the universe and those of the slightest atom. Nothing would 
be uncertain to such an intelligence, and the future no less than 
the past would be present to its eyes.” The time has already come 
when a knowledge of physical laws and familiarity with the instru- 
ments of physical research are indispensable to the naturalist. 
I would not recommend that dissipation of intellectual energy, 
which will make a man superficial in all the sciences but 
rofound in none. But Helmholtz has established, by his own 
example, the possibility of being an eminent physiologist and, 
at the same time, standing in the front rank of physicists and 
mathematicians. The restlessness of human inquiry will never 
be satisfied with knowing what things are, until it has also dis- 
covered how and why they are, and until all the relations of 
space, time, matter, and force, in all the kingdoms of nature, 
have been worked out with mathematical precision. 
It is a happy circumstance in the history of science, that this 
vast mechanical problem did not rush upon the mind at once in 
all its crushing generality. The solar system, with a despotic 
sun at the centre, competent to overrule all insubordination among 
planets and comets and check all eccentricities and jealousies, 
and so far isolated from neighbouring systems as to fear nothing 
from foreign interferences and entangling alliances, presented & 
comparatively simple problem: and yet the skill and labor of 
many generations of mathematicians have not yet closed up the 
argument upon this first case. On the orbits of this domestic 
system they have been sharpening their tools for higher and more 
delicate work. The motions of binary stars have also been 
brought under dynamical laws, and partially subjected to the rule 
of gravitation, so far as the astronomer can judge from the best 
observations which he can make upon those remote objects. Bat 
when he launches out, with his instruments and his formulas, 1» 
clusters of stars, even those of greatest symmetry, he is wholly 
at sea, without chart or compass or lighthouse, and with no other 
illumination than that which comes from a prophetic demonstration 
in Newton’s Principia. The mathematician has here to treat, not 
with an unlimited monarchy, as in the solar system, but with 4 
republic of equal stars, and the dynamical condition of the clus 
ters is involved in all the obscurity of molecular mechanics; fF 
