Page:Lectures on Ten British Physicists of the Nineteenth Century.djvu/94

 gested by Whewell to Faraday were paramagnetic and diamagnetic. To Lyell, the geologist, he suggested eocene, miocene, pliocene.

In 1833 Whewell published in the Transactions of the Royal Society the first of a series of memoirs on the tides. In its preface he says: "No one appears to have attempted to trace the nature of the connection among the tides for the different parts of the world. We are, perhaps, not even yet able to answer decisively the inquiry which Bacon suggested to the philosophers of his time, whether the high water extends across the Atlantic so as to affect contemporaneously the shores of America and Africa, or whether it is high on one side of the ocean when it is low on the other, at any rate such observations have not yet been extended and generalized." To this subject Whewell applied his method of the colligation of facts, more commonly called the reduction of observations. His main object was to reduce the enormous series of observations concerning the tides which had accumulated, and in this work he had the aid of skilled computors paid by the Admiralty or by the British Association. He began by constructing a map of cotidal lines for the whole globe, that is, lines drawn on the surface of the ocean and passing through all the points where it is high water at the same time. The succeeding memoirs were devoted to the discussion of observations at London, Liverpool, Plymouth, and other ports. There were fourteen of these memoirs and Airy thus estimates their value: "Viewing the two independent methods introduced by Mr. Whewell, of reducing the tabular numbers to law by a process of numerical calculation, and of exhibiting the law to the eye without any mathematical operation by the use of curves, we must characterize them as the best specimens of reduction that we have ever seen." Whewell did not grapple with the theory of the tides, that he left—to use his own words— "to bolder and stronger mathematicians." Neglect of the rôle played by theory, especially mathematical theory, in the discovery of truth, is the weak point in Whewell's philosophy. The reduction of observations to empirical laws is only one step in the process and not the most important.