to confine them among those to whom their profession renders them indispensable. the new terms are always multiples of the preceding ones; in which the chances of the succeeding terms being quickly found, increase in the same proportion as the terms themselves. It is for this reason that science, and the industry which it produces among all the creations of human genius, possess this peculiar advantage, that their flight not only cannot be interrupted but that it is continually accelerated. While the constitution of the human heart, drawing it incessantly back into the narrow circle of the same senti The fact alone would prove that if, in their beginnings, the sciences have been indebted for any thing to chance, and if ordinary men have made useful discoveries in them, henceforward it is only by the meditations of superior intellects that they can disseminate any new benefits. All the great practical discoveries which have been made in our times, possess exactly this feature, that they derive their origin from that method of generalization and that abstractionments and the same passions, prewhich have been introduced into scientifical researches. Those deep speculations and those abstruse difficulties which light and proud minds deride as useless are precisely what has been productive of the most marked utility. What experience demonstrates, a very simple reasoning will explain. At an early period, men had already discovered what required but a superficial observation, a rude mode of experiment, and the result was the vulgar arts; but in this first inspection of the resources of nature, those must necessarily have been neglected, the application of which could only become important by being multiplied, or which were accompanied by difficulties insurmountable in the then state of science. Profound conceptions therefore could alone open new tracks, and at every step a wider horizon was displayed. Every new use of a thing induces and multiplies the uses of a variety of other things; and each new property which is discovered assists in overcoming the obstacles that obstructed the employment of a multitude of other properties; it is in infinite progression, in which scribes to the art of governing men as well as to that of delighting them, bounds which they cannot pass, the ken of science is every day widening and extending; the field of external nature, which is her empire, enlarges in proportion as she rises above it, and in the whole immensity of space she can discern no limits to her success or to her hopes. Innumerable examples to illus. trate this reasoning present themselves to one who has studied the history of modern discoveries. Obliged to choose among such numerous efforts of genius, I will fix upon those which may most easily be explained in a few words; but, although I cannot hold them all up to public gratitude, they will all be comprised in what I shall say; for it is not so much my intention to dwell minutely on each discovery as to point out the spirit which inspired them all. We will begin by transcendant geometry which the loftiness of its abstractions would seem to place at the greatest distance from whatever is earthly and practical in the arts. From the earliest ages the course of the stars has clumsily directed series of cyphers which now seem to control even heaven itself. Natural philosophy followed, though far behind, the example of geometry, but in proportion as she approached it, she gave birth to a greater number of results of daily and popular use. If Rumford diminished by half the expense of those arts which require the use of fire; if he succeeded in nourishing the poor for eighteen farthings a meal, it was by means of a close study of the laws of the communication of heat. If filters of charcoal assure every where the salubrity of water, it is because certain Dutch chemists have examined minutely the laws of the absorption of gaseous substances. If Paris was not decimated in 1814 by the pestilential fever which the war brought into her hospitals, it is because Scheele, a Swede, had discovered, thirty years before, an acid which holds contagion a prisoner, and soon destroys even its germ. the path of navigators; more recently, the compass enabled them to lose sight of land; but now the pilot pursues his course on the ocean with as much certainty as if it had been traced for him by engineers; astronomical tables inform him at every moment on what point of the globe he is, and with so much exactness that he cannot err by an interval as great as is comprised in the glance of his eye. Antiquity could not believe that the vessels of Pharaoh Nechao had gone around Africa; and in our days Russia sends squadrons from one of her ports to another, circumnavigating thus three-fourths of the world, without any one remarking it. The English possess a flourishing colony at the antipodes of Europe, and they arrive there, beyond comparison more easily, than the Phoenicians went to Carthage or Cadiz. The first colonists of New Holland have lately passed a chain of mountains which concealed from them immense countries of wonderful fertility. In a few generations this country will be covered with a people of European origin, studying nature, Since the profound and matheworshiping her author, obeying thematical theory of the action of laws of humanity. It is the precision of astronomy which has rendered all this possible, and for this precision we are indebted to the formulas of our geometricians. Cook, Bougainville, Vancouver, would never have braved the polar ice, or the rocks of the Indian Ocean, nor would civilized men now dwell in New Holland, if Euler, Lagrange, Laplace, had not, in the seclusion of their cabinets, resolved certain very obstruse problems of the integral calculus; if Meyer, Delambre, Burkardt, Bürg had not, with wonderful patience, deduced from them those long VOL. I. Above all, there is nothing which equals the wonders of the steam-engine. heat, has made it the most powerful and at the same time the most easily managed implement, there is nothing of which it is not capable; we might suppose we had geometry and mechanics vivified. It spins, it weaves, and more equally than any workman, for there is neither inattention nor fatigue. In three strokes it makes shoes. A cylinder furnished with nippers cuts out the sole and fixes it to the upper leather; another cylinder makes the holes into which a third drives the small nails already prepared, which it rivets immediately and the shoe is made. It draws 2 R among the experiments that can be said to have changed the face of the world. The existence of the saccharine matter in vegetables differing from the cane, was also in appearance a discovery merely theoretic. Margraf, the author of it, was far from expecting that it would one day sap the basis of colonial monopoly, and take away every pretext for the horrid traffic in slaves. This effect, however, it will very proba We at first laughed at the manufacture of native sugar, because it seemed only to be part of a scheme of policy justly odious. The manufacturers bore our ridicule; but availing themselves of the light of science, they have perfected their processes, they have sold us much of their sugar without telling us of it; and if, as every thing appears to indicate, their profits are certain whenever the manufacture and the culture are put side by side, their industry will soon have furnished fifty millions' worth of a new product; it will provide occupation every winter for forty thousand persons, and the waste alone will fatten a hundred thousand oxen: and all this without diminishing by a single atom what our soil produced already. from the vat sheets of paper which might be prolonged to several leagues if it were necessary.-It prints! What admiration would not Guttemburg feel, that fortunate inventor of moveable characters, if he could see issuing by thousands, in a single night, from between two cylinders, without interruption, almost without the intervention of the hand, those voluminous journals, which afterwards penetrate to the centre of the forests of America, carrying with them the les-bly have, and that in a few years. sons of moral experience and the light of the arts? A steam-engine on a carriage, the wheels of which fit in a road prepared for them, draws a long line of other carriages. They are loaded, the fire is lighted, and they set off alone to be unladen at the end of their journey. The traveller who secs them thus traversing the plain, can scarcely believe his eyes. But can any thing be more surprising or more fruitful of important consequences than what we have lately witnessed? A vessel has crossed the neighbouring sea without canvas, without oars, without sailors. One man to feed the fire, another to guide the helm, compose her whole crew. It is impelled by an internal force, like an animated being, like a bird of the sea, skimming over the waves: such was the description of the captain. Every one may see how much this invention will simplify the navigation of our rivers, and how much agriculture will gain in men and horses, that may now return to the fields; but what we may also be permitted to descry at a distance, and what will perhaps be still more important, is the revolution to which it will lead in maritime warfare and in the power of nations. It is extremely probable that we shall have to reckon this This enormous augmentation of riches, these mighty changes in commerce, in navigation, in the relations of states, are to be traced to the idea which a chemist of Berlin conceived fifty years ago, of analyzing the juices of the beet by alcohol. But this discovery which may one day become so prolific, is only a single problem belonging to a theory much more elevated and already much more productive. I allude to the theory of the elements of organized substances, and of the facility of their metamorphoses, which has been especially developed by Lavoisier. As the immediate principles of organized bodies are at the same time a little variant from each other, and yet of the same nature, in the several species in which they are found, when one of these species fails, another supplies its place; and, if it be necessary, we create the principles of which we stand in need, by slightly varying the proportions in the elements of some other principle. In this new magic, the chemist has only to will: every thing may be changed into any thing; every thing may be extracted from any thing. Vinegar is made from wood, spermaceti from the flesh of horses, soap from that of fish, ammonia from the shreds of cloth, nitric acid from sugar, sugar from starch; an artificial horn is extracted from old bones which is extended and moulded at pleasure, or which is thinned into a drawing-paper as transparent as glass; a small quantity of sulphuric acid renders the most impure oil as free from disagreeable smell, and as clear as water; for several years past the lamps open to a current of air, light the smallest dwellings at ten times less expense than formerly; but chemistry saw that still more might be done; she has extracted inflammable gas from pit-coal, and illuminates manufactories, work-shops, entire houses with the same matter which served to warm them. The reservoir is in the cellar and the light is supplied by a cock to each apartment. This is, as well as many others, a French invention neglected among us and adopted by strangers. If the streets of London are not all lighted in this way, it is from the fear of injuring navi gation by reducing the price of whale-oil too low. It cannot but be permitted to speak of cyphers to the academy of sciences: it is almost your native language. Let it then be pondered, of what value to France during the last twenty years have been the practical inventions derived from the discoveries of Berthollet, Chaptal, Vauquelin, Thénard, &c.; in mineralogy alone, not a very extensive branch of the physical sciences: the extracting of soda, the manufacture of alum, of sal ammoniac, of the oxyds of lead, of the mineral acids, all of them substances which we draw from abroad; the smelting of iron, the cementation of steel, and, in fine, the development of the arts in which these primary materials are employed. It is evident that we must calculate by hundreds of millions. Well then! these treasures,these enjoyments: not one of the inventions to which we are indebted for them would have been had but for science; they are but facile appli cations of truths of a high order, of truths which have not been sought for this purpose, which their authors have pursued only for themselves, and solely from the ardour for knowledge. Those who reduce them to practice would never have discovered the germs of them; those on the contrary who have found those germs could never have bestowed the labour necessary for turning them to account. Absorbed in the high regions to which their contemplations transport them, they scarcely perceive the creations springing from a few words uttered by them. The work-shops which rise on every side, the colonies which are peopled, those vessels which cover the ocean, the abundance, the lux ury, the bustle which we see,-all | proceed from them, and yet remain as it were unknown to them. The moment that a doctrine becomes practical, they abandon it to the vulgar; it is no longer of importance to them. That such a noble and prolific spring might not be dried up, that the sublime language of meditation might be always heard, the munificence of our monarchs called science into their palaces, and granted to such as cultivate it, favours very honourable, without doubt, and yet very inferior to those which in any other career, the most adverse fortune would not have denied to such arduous labours. Although, to the honour of philosophy, this liberality might be by many considered as superfluous for its objects, it was certainly not a barren employment of the funds of the state, and we might wish that all its financial speculations were equally successful. So far from this branch of public expense being injurious to the interest of proprietors, the labours which it has produced or cherished have doubled within fifty years the income of lands, either by creating new arts which have call ed into use an immense number of raw materials, or by spreading through the country that variety of cultivation which enables every soil to receive what suits it best, and prevents the inclemency of the seasons from being felt by all crops at once. The renunciation of fallows which, imperfect as it is, has already brought into cultivation ten thousand square kilometers more than formerly, which means in other words that it is equivalent for France to the acquisition of a large province, is due to men who observed that land exhausted for one plant is not so for another, and that rotation of crops, founded on the different manner in which plants draw nourishment, is profitable in every soil and every climate. And yet it is not the cultivators who have discovered this: it is the botanists. The poor inhabitants of the Landes saw for ages the downs of the Gulf of Gascony advancing without opposition into the interior of the country, burying their houses, their churches, drowning their crops by the marshes which were pushed on before. They saw them and did not resist. Daubenton and Brémontier, said to them, stop; and from that moment whenever the methods of those Savans have been followed, the Downs remained immoveable. We may have whenever we choose, hundreds of square leagues in full tillage amidst sands which seemed destined to remain always the sport of the winds. It is probable that our landholders, far from having occasion to complain, would find themselves both richer and happier, if there had been employed in such conquests only the ten thousandth part of what was wrested from them to devastate the half of Europe, that we might lose it afterwards, and make ourselves abhorred. And it is only by what little has been done that we can explain how the national wealth and industry have survived so many restraints and extortions. The more they were oppressed by government, the more did science seem to increase her efforts to succour them. In fact, as long as the impulse which science has received shall not decline, we need not despair of the fortunes of the state. |
