Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/272

258 We are to consider this evening the phenomena of crystallization; but, in order to trace out the genesis of the notions now entertained upon the subject, we have to go a long way back.

In the drawing of a bow, the darting of a javelin, the throwing of a stone, in the lifting of burdens, and in personal combats, even savage man became acquainted with the operation of force. His first efforts were directed toward securing food and shelter; but ages of discipline—during which his force was directed against Nature, against his prey, and against his fellow-man—taught him foresight. He laid by at the proper season stores of food, and thus obtained time to look about him, and become an observer and inquirer. He discovered two things, which now more specially interest us, and sent down to us the knowledge of his discovery. He found that a certain resin dropped from the amber-tree possessed, when rubbed, the power of drawing light bodies to itself, and of causing them to cling to it; and he also found that a particular kind of stone exerted a similar power over a particular kind of metal. I allude, of course, to the loadstone, or natural magnet, and its power to attract particles of iron. Previous experience had enabled our early inquirer to distinguish between a push and a pull. In fact, muscular efforts might be divided into pushes and pulls. Augmented experience showed him that in the case of the magnet, pulls and pushes—attractions and repulsions—were also exerted; and, by a kind of poetic transfer, he applied to things external to himself the conceptions derived from the exercise of his own muscular power. The pushes and pulls of the magnet and of the rubbed amber were to him also force.

In the time of the great Lord Bacon, the margin of these pushes and pulls was vastly extended by Dr. Gilbert, a man probably of firmer fibre, and of finer insight, than Bacon himself; who, moreover, was one of the earliest to enter upon that career of severe experimental research which has rendered our science almost as stable as the system of nature which it professes to explain. Gilbert proved that a multitude of other bodies, when rubbed, exerted the power which thousands of years previously had been observed in amber. In this way the notion of attraction and repulsion in external Nature was rendered familiar. It was a matter of experience that bodies between which no visible link or connection existed, possessed the power of acting upon each other; and the action came to be technically called "action at a distance."

But out of experience in science there always grows something finer than mere experience. Experience, in fact, only furnishes the soil for plants of higher growth; and this observation of action at a distance furnished material for speculation upon the largest of all problems. Bodies were observed to fall to the earth. Why should they do so? The earth was proved to roll round the sun; and the moon to roll round the earth. Why should they do so? What