liv 



the year 1837, during the continuance of his tutorship, and the latter 

 about three years later. These works were preceded (in 1838) by his 

 Bridgewater Treatise ' On Astronomy and general physics considered in 

 reference to Natural Theology.' But that a great change in his views 

 as to the origin of our fundamental axioms must have taken place be- 

 tween the production of these and the last-mentioned work, may be 

 inferred from a remarkable passage in that Treatise*, in which he di- 

 stinctly refers the origin of even the axioms of Mathematics to experi- 

 ence, i. e. to a slow process of inductive observation, growing with our 

 growth, and not to any innate a priori intuition. 



Dr. "Whewell was one of the founders of the Cambridge University 

 Philosophical Society, whose initiation dates from November 15, 1819, 

 its first Meeting for the election of Officers being held on December 13 

 of that year, when Professor Parish was chosen President, and Dr. 

 Whewell was placed on the list of its Council. In 1820 he contributed 

 his first paper to its Transactions, " On the position of the Apsides in 

 orbits of great excentricity." To the Transactions of this bod}^ he 

 continued to contribute, up to within a short period of his death, papers 

 on a great variety of subjects, — on Dynamics, on Mineralogy and Crys- 

 tallography, on Logic and Philosophy (more especially on the Platonic 

 philosophy of ideas), and on the mathematical exposition of the doc- 

 trines of Political Economy, in which the formulae embodying the 

 results of those doctrines, as applied to questions of supply and demand, 

 price, currency, &c., are derived from what he cautiously terms " The 

 Equilibrium Theory" in analogy to the "Equilibrium Theory " of the 

 Tides, distinguishing very justly between this and their true or dyna- 

 mical theory, which takes account of momentary changes in the amount 

 and incidence of the acting causes, and allows for the time requisite to 

 enable them to work out their efi'ects — a distinction of the most impor- 

 tant kind, and one which goes to exhibit all the quantitative conclusions 

 deduced in this science on the other hypothesis as tentative and provi- 

 sional. 



During the summers of 1826 and 1828 he took part with Mr. Airy 

 in a series of experiments for ascertaining the mean density of the earth, 

 by comparing the rates of the same pendulum in deep mines and at the 

 surface. These experiments, made in the Dolcoath Mine, near Cam- 

 bourne, in Cornwall, were excellently planned, and, so far as they went, 

 admirably conducted ; but by a singular fatality were in both instances 

 cut short in their progress, and frustrated of their result, by accidents 

 which could not have been foreseen and provided against — in the one 

 case by the combustion in mid-air (from some cause never explained) of 

 the basket containing the pendulums and other apparatus, in the act 

 of raising them from the bottom of the mine to the surface — in the 

 other, by the mine itself becoming deluged with water, owing to the 

 * Bridgewater Treatise, p. 336, cli. is. et seq. 



