REVIEWS. 
409 
publishes it, but in great portion occupied with a series of papers of the 
utmost interest and importance to scientific men. It is indeed an admirable 
work, and is, we should think, first par excellence of all scientific annuals in 
the United States. Certainly a great deal of credit is due to the general 
experience of the Editor, and to the skill by which he selects both articles 
and writers. The articles in the present volume have most of them a high 
value, and though some of them are translations of not extremely recent 
papers, still they have an importance from the fact of their being valuable 
additions to the particular branch to which they belong, and also from the 
circumstances that few of the great mass of scientific readers are sufficiently 
acquainted with German or French to take them in satisfactorily in their 
original shape. The contents of the general appendix are as follows : — A 
Eulogy on A. D. Bache, by Professor Joseph Henry ; Lecture on Switzer- 
land, by the subject of the preceding paper; on a Physical Observatory, by 
Professor J. Henry ; the History of My Youth, an autobiography of Francis 
Arago; Eulogy on Herschel, by M. Arago; Life and Labours of H. G. 
Magnus, from the “ Archives des Sciences ” ; The Life of Professor Chester 
Dewey, LL.D., by M. T. Anderson, LL.D. ; On the Nature and Origin of 
Force, by W. B. Taylor ; Induction and Deduction, a discourse by Justus 
Baron von Liebig ; The Delation of Food to Work, and its Bearing on 
Medical Practice, by the Rev. Samuel Haughton ; Hydrogen as a Gas and 
as a Metal, by Dr. J. Emerson Reynolds ; On the Identification of the 
Artisan and the Artist, by the late Cardinal Wiseman ; and on the Diamond 
and other Precious Stones, by M. Babinet. Now, besides all these, most of 
which are really papers of exceeding interest, there are a series of smaller, 
more numerous, and equally valuable papers on Ethnology, Physics, and 
Meteorology by various foreign and American authors, thus completing a 
volume which is most creditable to the Institution from which it issues, 
unhappily a little too late. It seems to us that of all the papers which 
the work contains those on Gustavus Magnus, on Induction and Deduction, 
and on the Relation of Food and Work, are unquestionably the best in point 
of style and in regard to the matter they bring forward for discussion. 
Whilst, unquestionably, the weakest article in the volume, as well as the 
most antique, is that of Cardinal Wiseman on the Artisan and Artist : and 
we say so from no religious prejudice, for some of the Cardinal’s writings we 
particularly esteem. But of the three articles we have mentioned, Liebig’s 
is unquestionably the most interesting, the Life of Magnus being short and 
very general, and Professor Haughton’s paper having been very thoroughly 
brought before London readers in other journals. But Baron Liebig’s 
paper, while strictly scientific, is withal a contribution which may be read 
with interest by any intelligent reader. It deals both scientifically and 
popularly with the subject, and shows that what too many imagine, viz., 
that a knowledge of logic must precede discovery, is by no means true. In 
science as well as in common life the operations of the mind are executed, 
not according to the rules of logic, but the conception of a truth; the idea 
of a process or the cause of a phenomenon generally precedes the demonstra- 
tion ; the conclusion is not reached through the premises, but the conclu- 
sion goes before, and the premises are then first sought out as proof. 
Baron Liebig says that 11 in a conversation with a celebrated French mathe- 
