Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/803

Rh of Aristotelian tradition. The seal, however, was broken; the vase was already at the bottom of the sea, and it only remained to guide and propitiate a power which it was no longer possible to confine.

The "Philosophical History," of which Hooke traced the gigantic plan, would, in fact, have included what we now understand as the whole body of inductive science, with a considerable margin of heterogeneous material, difficult of classification, and more curious, perhaps, than useful. It would have included not only an enumeration of all possible phenomena, but the knowledge of the laws by which they are governed, and the causes by which they are produced. The natural historian was to be "knowing in hypotheses," that he might set his facts in plausible sequence of cause and effect; he was to be a skilled mechanician, and an able mathematician, that he might investigate their relations by experiment, and deduce the consequences of such relations by calculation. Hooke's "Helps of Discovery" are but another form of Bacon's "Prerogative Instances"; but it is significant that in the later system they appear in the preparatory stage, while in the earlier they form an integral part of the "Organum" itself. The impossible was, in fact, relegated to a distant future, while the possible took possession of the present. The "raising of axioms," and the discovery of "forms," which were supposed to constitute the true business of the philosopher, were postponed in favor of the more modest task of setting facts in order, and connecting them by means of ideas. Thus natural philosophy, in the recondite sense in which it was understood by the theorists of the seventeenth century, came, as time went on, to be more and more fully personated by her handmaiden, "Natural History," until at last the identity of the one was completely merged in that of the other. The intermediary whom they had admitted as a messenger of higher promise, they were compelled to take for better for worse. Like Malvolio, they had wooed the mistress; like Sir Toby, they wedded the maid.

We shall conclude our remarks on this singular essay by transcribing some specimens of the queries directed by Hooke to future investigators. Even after the lapse of above two centuries, they strike us as suggestive and ingenious. Under the heading of "Ether," he asks:

Whether it permeates all bodies, be the medium of light, be the fluid body in which the air is but as a tincture? Whether it cause gravity, in the earth or other celestial bodies?

Of the atmosphere:

Whether it encompasses the sun and planets, and that each of them have a peculiar atmosphere, as well as they have a gravitating power?

Whether the spots in the sun may not be clouds of smoke or vapors, raised up into that atmosphere?

Whether meteors have anything of fire in them, or whether the light may not be an effect of their rapid motion?