Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/211

Rh the laws of Kepler? With such an indorser, I may venture to quote these words of a consummate mathematician without fear of their being cast aside by the naturalists as one of Bacon's Idols of the Tribe: "An intelligence which at any given instant should know all the forces by which Nature is urged, and the respective situations of the beings of which Nature is composed, if, moreover, it were sufficiently comprehensive to subject these data to calculation, would include in the same formula the movements of the largest bodies of the universe and those of the slightest atom. Nothing would be uncertain to such an intelligence, and the future, no less than the past, would be present to its eyes." The time has already come when a knowledge of physical laws and familiarity with the instruments of physical research are indispensable to the naturalist. I would not recommend that dissipation of intellectual energy which will make a man superficial in all the sciences but profound in none. But Helmholtz has established, by his own example, the possibility of being an eminent physiologist, and, at the same time, standing in the front rank of physicists and mathematicians. The restlessness of human inquiry will never be satisfied with knowing what things are, until it has also discovered how and why they are, and all the relations of space, time, matter, and force, in all the kingdoms of Nature, have been worked out with mathematical precision.

It is a happy circumstance in the history of science, that this vast mechanical problem did not rush upon the mind at once in all its crushing generality. The solar system, with a despotic sun at the centre, competent to overrule all insubordination among planets and comets, and check all eccentricities and jealousies, and so far isolated from neighboring systems as to fear nothing from foreign interferences and entangling alliances, presented a comparatively simple problem; and yet the skill and labor of many generations of mathematicians have not yet closed up the argument upon this first case. On the orbits of this domestic system they have been sharpening their tools for higher and more delicate work. The motions of binary stars have also been brought under dynamical laws, and partially subjected to the rule of gravitation, so far as the astronomer can judge from the best observations which he can make upon those remote objects. But when he launches out, with his instruments and his formulas, into clusters of stars, even those of greatest symmetry, he is wholly at sea, without chart or compass or light-house, and with no other illumination than that which comes from a prophetic demonstration in Newton's "Principia." The mathematician has here to treat, not with an unlimited monarchy, as in the solar system, but with a republic of equal stars, and the dynamical condition of the clusters is involved in all the obscurity of molecular mechanics; for it matters not whether the individual members of a system are atoms or worlds, if the intervening spaces have corresponding magnitudes. Even in astronomy, the