ADDRESS OF PROFESSOR LOVERING. 625 
on which Magnus read, before the Berlin Academy, Kirchhoff’s 
memoir on the chemical constitution of the sun’s atmosphere, an 
the existence in it of familiar substances found upon the earth. 
Speedily, spectroscopes were multiplied, modified, and improved, * 
and became indispensable auxiliaries in the workshop, the labora- 
tory, and the observatory. It is not necessary to enlarge upon 
what this instrament has done for common chemistry, in hunting 
out the minutest traces of common substances and detecting new 
ones. The physician, the physiologist, the zoologist, the botanist, 
and the technologist. have shared with the chemist and the physi- 
cist the services of this powerful analyst. But it is the highest 
Prerogative of the spectroscope to be able to make a chemical 
analysis of celestial bodies, upon the single condition that they 
give to it their light. Polarization can only say whether any 
portion of this light is reflected. The motions which the telescope 
uncovers may decide in favor of a central attraction, but it is 
silent as to the intensity of this attraction unless the moving 
body belongs to the solar system. The universality of a gravi- 
tation may be proved, but not the universality of the very 
stavitation which pervades our own system; except by an argu- 
ment from analogy. We see that one star differs from another 
Star in glory. But what the other differences or resemblances 
até we know not, without the spectroscope. Henceforth astron- 
omy possesses a new instrument of discovery, and also a new 
tribunal to which all speculations about the sun and the stars, the 
aurora and the zodiacal light, the meteors and the comets, must 
‘brought and by which they must be judged. 
T leave it to the naturalists to assign a value to the alleged 
anticipations of Darwin by the geometer Maupertuis, who was 
Said to have died just before he was going to make monkeys talk. 
n and conceit of Lord Monboddo are not worthy of 
sya Lamarck began life as a soldier: was a meteorologist as 
| hipaa long as Napoleon. would allow him to be: perhaps he 
op. otanist from choice, but he was made a zoologist, in spite 
; : » by the revolutionary Convention. He was as brave in 
: "y M ae war; but he expected to create it, by a simple effort 
: his jo : Having demolished the modern chemistry, he turned 
: 208] noclastic zeal into natural history. His philosophy of 
Laplace Was published a few years after the cosmogony of 
< °S; in which the mathematician broaches the theory of evo- 
NER. NATURALIST, VOL. VIII. 40 
