Page:Herschel - A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1831).djvu/93

 structed, and appear precisely as it stood at their conclusion. To take another instance: mineralogy, till modern times, could hardly be said to exist. The description of even the precious stones in Theophrastus and Pliny are, in most cases, hardly sufficient to identify them, and in many fall short even of that humble object; more recent observers, by attending more carefully to the obvious characters of minerals, had formed a pretty extensive catalogue of them, and made various attempts to arrange and methodize the knowledge thus acquired, and even to deduce some general conclusions respecting the forms they habitually assume: but from the moment that chemical analysis was applied to resolve them into their constituent elements, and that, led by a happy accident, the genius of Bergmann discovered the general fact, that they could be cloven or split in such directions as to lay bare their peculiar primitive or fundamental forms, (which lay concealed within them, as the statue might be conceived encrusted in its marble envelope,)—from that moment, mineralogy ceased to be an unmeaning list of names, a mere laborious cataloguing of stones and rubbish, and became, what it now is, a regular, methodical, and most important science, in which every year is bringing to light new relations, new laws, and new practical applications.

(68.) Experience once recognized as the fountain of all our knowledge of nature, it follows that, in the study of nature and its laws, we ought at once to make up our minds to dismiss as idle prejudices, or at least suspend as premature, any preconceived