1. THE SPANISH MOTHER, painted by Sir David Wil- France, The Crown Matrimonial of-Dublin 2. EUGENIE DE GUZMAN, EMPRESS OF FRANCE, en- 3. BENJAMIN D'ISRAELI, engraved by Sartain. 4. THE WIFE OF BUNYAN INTERCEDING FOR HIS RE- 135 167 275 307 French Spy System, Anecdote of, Franklin, Sir John, Search for-Quarterly Re- French Memoirs, Modern-Fraser's Magazine, 360 429 531 Apsley House-Quarterly Review, Alexander-Bentley's Miscellany, Anecdote of the French Spy System—Cham- 128 Hawthorne, Nathaniel-Colburn's New Monthly, 481 Barrere Fraser's Magazine, Bozzies Eliza Cook's Journal, Beattie, James-Hogg's Instructor, Bounty, The Mutiny of, 449 Celebrities, Female, 167 Layard's Second Expedition-English Review, 341 Last Hour's of Napoleon-Sharpe's Magazine, 373 Landor, Walter Savage. Writings of Cham- Thackeray, 18 34 Sir William Hamilton, 98 141 285 THE progress of science is as orderly and | determinate as the movements of the planets, the solar systems, and the celestial firmaments. It is regulated by laws as exact and irresistible as those of astronomy, optics, or chemistry; although the weather of our changeful English atmosphere may not appear to be more fitful and capricious, that is to say, at first sight and to the uninstructed eye. To put it more logically, both the uncrowded procession of nature, and the triumphant march of discovery, are the expression and the proclamation of the ideas or unwritten laws of development, which they respectively embody. It is only by a bold figure of speech, drawn from the sense of human freedom and fallibility before the unlidded eye of conscience, that those phenomenal ongoings (of nature and science, namely) can properly be said to obey their several laws of evolution. Where it is impossible to disobey, it is also impossible to obey. Things do not, therefore, obey the law of necessity or omnipotence: they represent, manifest, incorporate, reveal, or show it forth; as the whole physiognomy of a man (could it but be understood) is nothing less than an express and admirable picture of "the spirit of a man that is in him." Be the worth of this distinction in the present connection what it may, however, it is assuredly a centred and standing law that the very opposition, which is always being offered to the advancement of truth, whether by uncongenial circumstance or inconsiderate man, is overruled by principles as fixed, if not yet so calculable, as those disturbing forces that systematically retard the flight of Encke's comet, or drag big Neptune from his solar orbit. Both the new investigator and his hinderers may rest assured, that they unconsciously conspire at once to hasten and to steady the career of science. The discoverer, in good sooth, who knows this so truly as to live on the belief of it, as the religion of his inquiring soul, annihilates obstruction and enmity. Everything is then propitious to the fulfilment of his vocation: 1 2 his own defects, his exaggerated single faculty, his unprovided wants, perhaps his Nessus' shirt of a bodily organization, evil days and evil tongues, and all the elements of seeming ill are on his side: his proud oppressors are nowhere to be found, for all men are his friends, although they know it not! only in extent, a perfect science, and the only true Work without a Peer* in all the world of modern discovery. It was just as naturally that chemistry followed in the train of physical astronomy. Long before Dalton it had been apprehended that the constituent particles of the sensible forms, at least of planetary, or rather of accessible matter, are in reality the agents and the patients of all chemical mutations, notwithstanding the apparent phenomenon of mass incorporating with mass. Newton, not to mention the abstract hypotheses of Leibnitz and Boscovich, who were not veritable chemists like our discoverer, Newton himself, after having risen from experimental mechanics to astronomical computations, came down with all the swoop and force of analogy upon the interior nature of those sensible forms, from the dynamical laws of which he had mounted to the theory of the solar system. He conceived that the chemical propensity of one body for another consists in the attraction of the particles of the former for those of the latter; pair by pair, like the earth and the moon, or one with more, as Jupiter and his satellites: and also that, when a compound of two bodies is decomposed by the coming of a third into the field of action, it is because the particles of the new substance are more attractive of one and more repulsive of the other original constituent, than these constituents are attractive of each other, and than one of them is repulsive of the intruding body. It is a question of attractions and repulsions: the contest lies betwixt the sum of one attraction and repulsion, and the sum of another such pair of forces: the victory is decided by the The order of succession, in which the natural sciences (for here is no question concerning logic and the mathematics, much less concerning philosophy proper) have made their appearance in the course of human progress towards Paradise Regained, has largely depended on the relations of their several objects to the person and resources of man; that is to say, considering such succession as a thing quite apart from the internal development of those sciences, taken severally or together. The parts of nature are not equally near, nor yet equally accessible to him, standing on this planetary orb and beholding the sun and moon, nay, the vast majority of things, deploying before him according, not to the truth of even phenomenal reality, but to that of mere seeming. Seeing nothing as it really is, but on the contrary everything nearly upside down, as if he were standing on his head, it behooved him to grasp at anything in the beginning of his scientific existence. Thus the mechanics of those palpable forms, which more immediately surround and withstand or help him, was naturally brought to something like perfection (always meaning perfection of method, not of invention or application) before it was possible to apply the same instrumentality, as had been brought to bear upon such problems with success, to the distant and majestic mechanism of the solar system. Even so lately as the time of Newton, the sublime divinations and hypothetical demonstrations of Kepler had to be postponed, by a stricter logic, to the celebrated mechanical experiment, which yielded both the idea and the ratio of the law of gravitation. That memorable apparatus, with the seconds' MSS., which were burned by the overturning of a pendulum and the falling weight, was noth-light, contained the results of prolonged experimen tations in chemistry, the reigning monarch of asing less than the desiderated fulcrum of our tronomy having even dared to dream of conquests own Archimedes, who lifted the astronomy in that new world, of such a nature as is scouted of Copernicus, Galileo, and John Kepler by the Grahams and Liebigs of this bitter-beerwith his lever, and placed it once for all drinking generation. Was anything lost in these flames To say Yes, were to arraign Providence, where it now rests for ever. It was after or, at least, the harmonia præstabilitata; to say the development of mechanics, and through No, were almost to insult the memory of the asthe mediation of a mechanical experiment, tronomer-chemist. Diamond, Diamond, little wotthat the Copernican system became the tedst thou, when thou didst lift thy leg, that all the water in thy body could not quench the fire, nor model of knowledge, capable of indefinite all the blood in it pay the damages! They say growth, though not susceptible of essential that Newton never had the heart to resume his change; consummate in method, unfinished alchemical-atomic studies. * Stahl inscribed the "Physica Subterranea" of Beecher with the lofty phrase "Opus sinè Parù." And, certes, it was as wonderful a piece of creation, half brought out of its chaos, as the history of science can show:-but the Copernico-Newtonian astronomy is of another order of thing! It seems to be understood that those Newtonian mere weight of numbers, representing amounts | gested to Torbern Bergman (better known now of force. Such was Sir Isaac's theory of as the discoverer of Scheele the discoverer, chemistry and it needs only be added, that than by anything he achieved in chemistry, this is the origin of that tenet of the Lavoi- yet a much-accomplished man of science) sierian chemistry (more expressly brought the thought of applying the mathematics to out by Fourcroy, but still implicitly held in the illustration of chemical movements. Could the science) which identifies the attraction not the relations of those orbicles of matter, of cohesion between equal and similar parti- called atoms or particles, be measured and cles, such as two sulphurs, and the attraction asigned by geometry, in the same manner as of affinity between a pair of unequal and dis- the relations of those orbs, called heavenly similar particles, such as a sulphur and a bodies or globes? The same question occurhydrogen, the constituents of hydrosulphuric red to Buffon: but both the Swedish chemist acid. Be that tenet the truth of nature, or and the French naturalist gave over this one of those misconceptions which are so monition of their genius as impracticable; often permitted at once to speed and to check and that for the same so-called reason, namethe progress of human science, such was ly, because they supposed (not knew, but Newton's notion of affinity in those early thought they knew) that the particles of days; but, so far as can now be known, he sensible matter (say, of a stone or a watermade nothing of it as an organon of discov- drop) are so vastly near each other, though ery. The master of astronomy and the cre- demonstrably not in contact, as that their ator of optics, he does not appear to have shapes come into the geometrical question, done anything for concrete chemistry, his and vex it with hopeless perplexity. In conlaboratory notwithstanding: always saving nection with the mineralogical theory of the and excepting his conjecture that the dia day, the shapes of particles were deemed to mond should be combustible because it is be as numerous as their kinds, and as pictura strong refractor, a prosperous guess which esque as the crystals in a museum: so that it it is customary to extol as sagacious, in spite was an anachronism to speak of atoms as of the notorious fact that there are stronger orbicles in the last sentence, but it was inrefractors than that crystalline carbon, which tentional; for it is our present business, as it are not combustible a whit! Its combusti- is our pleasure, to strip these things of their bility has no connection with its refractive technicality, and to present them in as broad power, in fact and, though the hypothesis and human an aspect as possible, for the was not atrociously inconsequent when it was sake of the stranger in those parts of study. made, it is as ridiculous as illogical to admire Let it be clearly understood then, that it was it now. It was just one of those countless not till such conceptions of the material forlittle strokes of fortune, which are constantly ces (as had almost kindled Bergman into befalling the man of genius and industry. another Newton, as has just been seen!) In the game of discovery, long and difficult had been fairly shed into the scientific mind though it is, Nature always gives her darling of Europe, that chemistry was able to assert loaded dice, because she will have him win itself with effect and emphasis, as a member the day. But Isaac Newton has almost be- of the Holy Alliance of the Positive Sciences come the mythical man or demigod of Brit- in Europe. Scheele, Priestley, Cavendish, ish science, owing partly to the assault of Black, and LAVOISIER, were the successors of Voltaire, partly to the lofty rhymes of Thom- Sir Torbern and his feckless compeers; and, son, partly to the clangorous eloquence of ever since their achievements, their science Chalmers, yet chiefly and all but entirely, to has grown bigger and bigger with unborn the overwhelming conceptions with which progeny. Every ten years or so, it gets his very name amazes the mind: and one of more deeply inwrought with the greater inthe consequences is, that all sorts of trum-terests of mankind. Already it creates endpery stories about falling apples, as well as every kind of encomium, may be heaped with impunity on the Atlantean shoulders of "the incomparable Mr. Newton," now that the shade is divinized! If nil nisi bonum is to be written on the tomb of the vulgar dead, after all; what shall men not say or sing, if so please their uncrowned majesties, at the shrines of the immortals! The discoveries of the astronomers sug less manufactories; already it tills the ground: and it prepares to cast its light into the subterranean physics (to borrow the title of Beccher's Chaotic Opus) of geology, and into the still more secret physics of physiology, pathology, therapeutics; all its gifts and promises being, even ostentatiously, fraught with practical benefits and intentions. In short, notwithstanding the prowess of Herschell and the astronomers, or of Cu |