Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/836

814 the compounds formed of those elements, and in the constitution of the stars and the parts they perform in the grand whole.

Are we authorized now to assume from this a unity of forms that life may put on not only in the sister planets to ours, but also in the other systems of worlds scattered through the skies? May we especially push our inductions still further and higher, conclude from such material unity upon a mental and moral unity, and say that, as there is only one physics and one chemistry in the universe, there are also only one logic, one geometry, and one moral, and that the beautiful, the good, and the true are identical and of the universal order everywhere?

Science, embracing in its results only immediate and demonstrated facts, does not warrant us in going so far as this, but with the truths it unfolds to us seems to invite us toward it.

There were brilliant minds in antiquity, which upon bases otherwise restricted conceived and proclaimed verities concerning the world and the universe which the most modern science has only been able to confirm.

Let us, then, respect these cheerful speculations. If they are still only of things preconceived, who can affirm that science will not make them real to us to-morrow? By establishing the laws and harmonies of the material world, astronomy prepares us for the conquest of truths of a still higher order.

We can say then plainly that the subjection of natural forces and the reign of man over Nature are only the first fruits of science. It prepares other fruits for its votary of a higher and more precious order. By the beauty of the studies to which it invites him, by the grandeur of the horizons which it opens out to him, and the sublimity of the spectacle it gives him of the laws and harmonies of the universe, it promises to win him away from his present preoccupations, which are perhaps too exclusively positive, and will restore to him under a new form and in an incomparable grandeur that taste for elevated poetry, that enthusiasm for the beautiful, and that reverence for the ideal which are among the most imperious needs of the human soul and which it never abandons without peril.—Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from the Revue Scientifique.

is suggested by a correspondent of Nature as a possible advantage of the want of symmetry in the arrangement of the branches of trees, that the want of synchronism of movement in consequence of it may help prevent their being overturned in times of high wind. He speaks of having watched the branches of a large plane tree during a high gale, when "it seemed incredible that the tree could stand, but for the fact that while one large limb was swaying one way, another would be swaying the opposite way, and so on, all plunging and bending anyhow, with no two in harmony."