thus with Gilfillan? Of his lectures, the subjects themselves may have suggested a similarity of style to that of the authors to which they have been devoted, and of whom he is charged with imitation. We by no means wish to affirm, however, that the mind of Dawson is altogether original: what mind is? German thought is now germane, not only to the intellect of Europe, but also to that of America. Dawson may not be entirely original as a thinker. It would be a vast wonder if he were. It is as a preacher simply that we contend for his originality. As a thinker he may confuse himself with the subjective and the objective of Germanism; he may mix mysticism with mind; he may recoin Carlyle; but as a preacher he has that purity and simplicity in him, derived from the Gospel, which neither Carlyle nor Emerson possess. In his preaching may be observed his originality, both in its matter and in its manner. In its matter, fresh and new to the pulpit, delivered either with the unaccustomed simplicity of the Scriptures, or with a remarkable novelty of illustration. In its manner, naïve and striking, as free from the conventionality of the conventicle, as from the custom of the cathedral. Such is the originality of Dawson. Gilfillan can never remove its impression from the minds of those who have heard the young preacher of Birmingham.

If the name of George Dawson is coupled with one name more than another in England, it is that of W. J. Fox, M.P., the celebrated lecturer of Finsbury. There is, how ever, no comparison between the two, except by contrast. Fox is an orator, Dawson is a discourser. Dawson is eloquent, Fox is rhetorical. There is a sonorous sound from the spirit of Fox, now like the peal of organ pipes, now like the blast of a trumpet. Between the lips of Dawson there appears, on the contrary, a liquid lyre, from which a silvery sense resounds which startles us not by the force of fire, but by the power of its sweetness. Dawson is lyrical; Fox is epic. Fox builds the measured lofty rhyme, with all the art of an architect in music, story on story, pile on pile, base and column, entablature and frieze, cupola and cornice, until at length an arrowy pinnacle shoots upward towards heaven. George Dawson pours forth apparently an unpremeditated song, as

if his harp hung on a willow, and was swept with the sighing sough of a breeze, beneath the sky of the Scriptures. In fact Fox is more Greek, and pagan, and artistic-while Dawson is more Hebrew, and Christian, and instructive. Such are their characteristics by contrast. Not that each does not occasionally evince a portion of the other's power, but that they are rather to be characterized by contrastive development than by those things in which they accord. Both men of mind, the one a victorious veteran, yet weighty in war; the other, a young athlete, already stripped and fighting in the training lists; the comparison, even by contrast, must be as pleasing to the former as it is honorable to the latter.

In literature the strength of Dawson has not yet been tried. As a writer, he has published, however, two or three tracts; the most notable of these is entitled "The Demands of the Age upon the Church." In this he reminds us, that there are three states which men have to pass through. "When all are very ignorant, the chances are that all will think very much alike, if they think at all; when all are partially educated, that no two will think alike; when all shall be fully educated, the probability is, that all will think alike again. At present we are in the second of these stages. For this, entire liberty of thought is prescribed. "In full freedom alone can true unity be gained." Besides these tracts, the editorship of the Birmingham Mercury is ascribed to their author. Such is the name of a cheap local newspaper, which has but lately been commenced. On the issue of its first number, the doors of the office in Birmingham were literally besieged, and ten thousand copies sold; a fact unprecedented in the annals of provincial publication. Its leaders undoubtedly display the train of thought of him to whom they are ascribed.

The subject of our memoir has been lately married to the sister of a Christian minister. His labors are arduous, but he relaxes by a trip to the continent every summer.

For the rest, George Dawson is known as a friend of the people, as a promoter of peace, a champion of education, and a teacher of temperance. May his sun increase, and this page of his life become its least impor

tant record.

POPULAR Science is less a concession to the spirit of our age than is by many imagined. It has always in modern times been the humble attendant on mathematical philosophy, like the squire on the knight in the days of chivalry. "Let us," said D'Alembert, "find out the thing-there will be no lack of persons to put it into shape;" and, in fact, since the revival of letters, whenever a discoverer has delivered the text, there have been plenty of commentators to expound it to the multitude. His immediate pupils have become his interpreters to the larger audience, who, without taste or time for algebra and geometry, were eager to be initiated into the laws of the universe. But though several manuals, either original or translated, existed previously, it was the publication of the Principia-the greatest step ever taken in mathematical physicswhich gave in England, by the splendor and interest of its discoveries, an equal impulse to popular science. The homage which innovators must often await from posterity, it was Newton's good fortune to receive from contemporaries. A system above attack, and a genius too pre-eminent for envy, might not of themselves have silenced opposition; for ignorance and prejudice hear no reason and respect no claims. But the abstruseness of the Principia insured him a trial by a special jury. None could approach who were incapable of appreciating the work, and in its main positions to understand and be convinced by it were identical things. Being written in a language which only scholars could read, and consisting of reasoning which only the profoundest geometricians could comprehend, the sale, of necessity, was exceedingly slow. A single edition satisfied the demand for more than twenty years. Philosophers are always a minority, and Halley wrote to Newton while it was printing, that even of philosophers

"by much the greater number were without mathematics." But the scientific literature of those twenty years is a conclusive proof that it was not neglect which retarded the circulation.* It found an audience fit though few-persons who received it with the reverence of disciples, and placed their glory in extending the renown of the master. The fondest idolatry could hardly heighten panegyrics which were only not extravagant because Newton was their object. "The incomparable" and "the illustrious" were the epithets bestowed on him; his genius was said to be more than human, and it was affirmed that the united discoveries of mechanical science from the creation of the world did not amount to a tenth part of what he, in a single publication, had disclosed. Stamped with the approbation of consummate judges, the majority accepted the conclusions of the Principia without cavil or mistrust, and joined in admiring truths the demonstration of which they were incompetent to understand. Locke, after obtaining from Huygens, with characteristic caution, an assurance that the mathematical propositions of the Principia were unimpeachably correct, studied for himself, in the original work, the physical laws, and enrolled himself among the adherents, as he was before among the friends, of its author. Newton appears to have been proud of the circumstance, for he often related it. bulk of the public might well be content

The

*The interval which elapsed between the first and second editions of the Principia is the principal argument of those who delight to discover that great works were received with indifference on their original publication. Our remarks throughout are confined to Great Britain, but it would be easy to refute the assertion of Voltaire that Newton at his death had not above twenty followers out of England. It was a gross and wilful exaggeration to enhance the importance of his own services in spreading the Newtonian philosophy.

with the authorities and arguments which satisfied the sceptic scrupulosity of Locke. In the mean while the first students constituted themselves the centres of fresh circles, for whom they simplified a geometry obscure from its depth and often from its brevity, and supplied connecting links to what Newton left a disjointed chain, seemingly unconscious that the intuition of others was less than his own. Each succeeding circle, as when a stone is flung into the water, gave birth to a wider, which, after the lapse of upwards of a century and a half, is still enlarging as population increases and education is diffused.

It was in 1687 that the Principia appeared, and within three or four years at furthest its doctrines were taught officially in the universities of England and Scotland. Newton himself took care of Cambridge. Edinburgh and St. Andrews, worthily represented, the first by David Gregory, the second by his brother James, had, previous to 1690, begun to train their scholars in the new philosophy. Oxford, which, notwithstanding the celebrated Wallis filled the chair of geometry, was, we suppose, deficient in indigenous mathematicians, imported David Gregory from Scotland in 1692, and made him Savilian Professor of Astronomy. He justified their choice by the publication of his Elements of Physical and Geometrical Astronomy, which won from Newton the praise that it was an excellent explanation and defense of his system, and which Keill, the countryman, pupil, and successor of Gregory, predicted would last as long as the sun and the moon. But the plaudits of a generation are not immortality. Gregory's sun is almost set. The remaining copies repose upon upper shelves, and the spider spins its web from cover to cover, secure that it will not be snapped by the opening of a book which time has closed.

It was Gregory's object to bring down the Principia to the average level of mathematical minds. Keill went further, and sought to reduce science to the lower level of instructed mankind. What Gregory in his Elements did for Newton, Keill did for Gregory in his Astronomical Lectures, which were first read to his class at Oxford, published in Latin in 1718, and again in English, translated by himself, in 1721. That a treatise on astronomy should involve a certain amount of geometry is little more than to say that to write implies the use of an alphabet. But a partial knowledge of Euclid is nearly all that Keill's lectures require,

and though only explaining the movements of the heavenly bodies, and not the physical causes which produce them, they have never been surpassed, within their limits, for clearness of conception and simplicity of exposition. Another work of Keill, less laborious but more esteemed, preceded his Astronomy. He delivered in 1700, in the schools of Oxford, a course of lectures in Latin on the elements of mechanics, and a year afterwards committed them to the press under the title of "Introductio ad veram Physicam." Maupertuis had such an opinion of this little treatise, that on his visit to England in 1729 he procured its translation into the vernacular tongue, and it is stated in the Biographie Universelle, that when the Newtonian philosophy took root in France, it was considered the best introduction to the Principia. It deserved the distinction. The fundamental principles of mechanical science are here made easy to ordinary apprehension, with a sparing use of geometrical demonstrations-and those clear, elegant, nearly self-evident-what most knew and all could learn. But a greater merit was the familiar illustrations which, rendered traditional by their singular aptness, are as surely repeated as the laws they elucidate, in every succeeding work of the kind. What proportion of them was due to his predecessors, and what to himself, it is difficult to determine. Writers on science have generally professed a greater awe of pedantry than of plagiarism, and contenting themselves at most with general acknowledgments, have declined to distinguish borrowed from proper wealth. It is not always they are willing to submit to the treatment they inflict. It is amusing to see authors, who are rich in rifled plumage, eagerly asserting a claim to some solitary feather plucked from themselves. originality is rendered probable by the repeated references of his immediate successors, who, if earlier claimants had existed, were likely to have known them.

Keill's

Keill now took the final step in popularizing science. The system of Descartes was supposed to owe much of its success to the circumstance that it was independent of mathematics. All adopted what all could understand. Many had been heard to say, that if geometry was indispensable to the Newtonian philosophy, they would continue Cartesians, preferring sloth and fiction to labor and truth-and more were influenced by the same motive, although ashamed to confess it. Keill was desirous to deprive the enemy of the advantage derived to error

from indolence, and he hit on the scheme of making experiment do the work of geometry -of demonstrating through the action of mechanical contrivances what had hitherto been established by mathematical reasoning. In the year 1704 or 1705 he commenced a course of lectures at Oxford, in which, by means of philosophical apparatus, the conclusions of theory were reduced to practice. Others had exhibited isolated phenomena; Keill was the first who gave a connected system of natural philosophy, in which every experiment was the proof of a proposition, and every proposition a step in the argument. From hence dates a fresh era for science. The Cartesians, finding the abstractions of the mind made visible to the eye, no longer objected to the Newtonian philosophy that it was in alliance with mathematics; and the more numerous body who, in assenting to discoveries, the pride of their country, believed they scarce knew what, and scarce knew why, were enabled to exchange a blind trust for an enlightened conviction. A logical system of science was converted into an entertaining exhibition, and crowds flocked to the lectures not more to be instructed than amused. Thus out of a university which has often been accused of its anti-popular tendencies in education, issued Natural Philosophy in its most popular and attractive form, and there are some who have since sought honor in the same path, who little dreamt that they drew their pedigree from an Oxford professor.

Kiell left Oxford in 1710. A pupil, (son of a Nantes refugee,) by name Desaguliers, afterwards the friend and assistant of Newton, succeeded to his office, and continued lecturing for three years at Hart Hall. Then he removed to London, where he enjoyed a long and triumphant career. He states in the Lectures he published in 1734, that he was engaged in his hundred and twenty-first course; that of eleven or twelve persons who pursued his profession in different places, eight were his scholars; that he had numbered among his audience two successive monarchs, George I. and George II.; and shows that the patronage was likely to descend with the crown, by subscribing himself in the dedication "Experimental Philosopher to the Prince of Wales." What was more to the purpose, "all ranks and all professions" hastened to be initiated into the Newtonian physics, and he specially records that "the ladies" went to school to him as well as the men. They appear to have intended something more

than to while away a tedious hour when weary of parties, concerts, and plays; for Kiell mentions in the translation of his Astronomy, that he made it "at the request and for the service of the fair sex." England had then no Mrs. Somerville. But in other respects, the female generation which heard the lectures of Desaguliers, and read the Astronomy of Kiell, have left their descendants slender reason to boast the march of intellect in science, to think with contempt of their ancestors, or with pride of themselves. Natural philosophy had, in fact, for a period, become the fashion, and it is the fate of fashions, both wise and foolish, to pass away. While the world grew wiser, its accomplished teacher did not grow richer. It is mournful to relate, that from want of prudence, or want of patronage, Dr. Desaguliers fell into penury, and Cawthorn tells in nervous and pathetic verse

"How he who taught two gracious kings to view
All Boyle ennobled, and all Newton knew,
Died in a cell, without a friend to save,
Without a guinea, and without a grave!"

The

It was said by a French wit that wives and almanacs were only of value for a year. Books of science, without much exaggeration, might have been placed by the side of almanacs and wives. Discovery is the companion of Time, and new doctrines incessantly added, erroneous notions as constantly exploded, soon render summaries of knowledge inaccurate and incomplete. There are no standing classics among the manuals of science-not owing to any deficiency either of talent or of industry, but because a portrait loses its resemblance when the features of the subject are altered by time. works on natural philosophy which, from primitive defects, do not perish of disease, in the nature of things must die of old age. But apart from the disadvantage of writing from a scroll continually unrolling, the popular authors of Newton's era will stand a comparison, as instructors, with nearly all of the many who have built on their foundation. The art of explanation has received few improvements. In its methods and resources it remains much as it was left by Keill and Desaguliers. Their principal point of inferiority is their style. They never thought of tempering the severity of science by the graces of literature. Unless when restrained by a learned language, they were more mindful of what they said than how they said it, and wrote with all the carelessness and familiarity of conversation. But