Page:Report on public instruction in the lower provinces of the Bengal presidency (1850-51).djvu/20

viii it may be questioned whether the wit of man ever produced anything more admirably subtle than great work on this subject. But not to dwell on this, such objections surely overlook the application of mathematics to natural philosophy, in the pursuit of which many of the most valuable faculties of the mind are called into action. Industry and acuteness of observation for collecting phenomena; judgment in discriminating between appearances resembling but not wholly identical with each other; invention for the discovery of crucial experiments to test the merits of conflicting theories, and decide between them: while the powerful resources of mathematical calculation stand ever ready to the hand of the adept to solve mere difficulties of intricate combination, like some mighty engine, by which a man can wield at will masses of matter far beyond his unassisted strength to lift; and extricate from among the data of observation and experiment the hidden consequences which lie too deeply buried in involved circumstances for undisciplined reason to discover.

"To select one among the many beautiful applications of mathematical knowledge,—what science can be thought more magnificent, or better suited to raise the intellect than Astronomy?

"To those who have not painfully followed the successive steps of demonstration, each resting on what went before, and patiently built up from the most elementary propositions of to the sublime speculations of  and his followers, does it not appear little short of miraculous, that human sagacity, unaided by divine revelation, should have soared so far beyond the world in which mankind are placed as to have detected the laws which link the whole visible creation into one mighty and stupendous system? that the astronomer can predict with unerring skill the paths and motions of those points of starry light,—points of light to the ignorant, but rolling worlds to him,—so far removed from our sphere that many are even invisible to our sense, but for the assistance of wonderful instruments, which also are of his invention? that he shows them wandering in their all but boundless career, obedient to the same universal law, which governs the motions of a ripe fruit or withered leaf falling at our feet?

"Let me bring this more vividly before you by illustration. Go with me in imagination where I was a few years ago, in one of the busiest thoroughfares of London, the busiest city of the world, into the study of a philosopher, the late, a stock-broker by profession, but by taste and genius a mathematician and an astronomer.