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vestigated, and we publish what is said on both sides. Now, though you 
have good scientific papers read in the Royal and other societies, you have 
also bad papers ; but the objections taken to them are too often lost sight of, 
not being reported. But surely the only way in which science can be pro- 
perly arrived at is when it is discussed as it is here, and as it was among the 
ancients in their academies not taught dogmatically, in what Bacon calls 
“ the professorial style.” There is one remark as to this, which Mr. Waring- 
ton’s observations have suggested. I went with much that he said with 
reference to appeals to conscience and authority in religion, though even 
that might require a little qualification. But when he came to argue for 
such absolute authority in the teaching of science, it struck me that if his 
principles had been thoroughly at work among people who believed the earth 
to be a level plain, they would never have been allowed to think or prove the 
earth to be round ; and if taught to submit in this abject way to authority in 
science when men believed the earth to be stationary, we should never 
have had the Copernican theory put forward, and not any modification of 
it allowed afterwards. We have surely had too much of this authority in 
the world already. We are just as prejudiced and positive about our 
current theories as ever the ancients were about theirs, and there is, 
in fact, a growing odium scientificum among us now, apparently in- 
tended to supersede the odium theologicum of former days, when science 
was not the fashion. Now, I think neither one theory nor another in 
science should be taught as absolute truth ; but all regarded as matters of 
free inquiry ever open to investigation. We, however, boast of the great ad- 
vancement we have made in science, — and Dr. Gladstone would be the last 
man to say that we have not truly made great strides in science, — but, how 
have we done so ? Not by teaching it as now proposed at the Universities ; 
but by science being comparatively free ; and by means of the press, and 
societies like this, such as the Royal Society and the Royal Institution of 
Great Britain, of both which Dr. Gladstone is so distinguished a member. — I 
shall conclude by citing from the Transactions of the Royal Society a fact 
little known, relating to what has been certainly taught most authoritatively 
in our Universities, and is the greatest boast of modern science — “ universal 
gravitation. In vol. ii. of the Philosophical Transactions from 1672 to 1683, 
(Lond. 1809, pp. 126, 127 ; Vol. ix. of the original edition, anno 1674,) there 
is an account of a book, entitled An Attempt to prove the Motion of the Earth 
from observations made by Robert Hook, F.R.S., in 4to. 1674. Hook was the 
well-known Secretary of the Royal Society ; and in this book we have the 
theory of universal gravitation (which is generally taught as having occurred 
to Sir Isaac Newton, by a kind of inspiration of genius, from observing the 
fall of an apple) actually published, and an account of it given in the 
Transactions of the Royal Society of London, twelve years before Newton 
produced his Principia. The Principia is said to have been some two years 
m MS. ; but that still leaves ten years’ priority to Hook. This is what ap- 
pears in the Philosophical Transactions, and you will see it is precisely 
Newton’s law which Hook then put forward — 
