' I take pleasure in persuading myself that scientific subjects
may be treated of in language at once dignified, grave, and animated, and
that those who are restricted within the circumscribed limits of ordinary
life, and have long remained strangers to an intimate communion with nature,
may thus have opened to them one of the richest sources of enjoyment, by
which the mind is invigorated by the acquisition of new ideas. Communion
with nature awakens within us perceptive faculties that had long lain
dormant; and we thus comprehend at a single glance the influence exercised
by physical discoveries on the enlargement of the sphere of intellect, and
perceive how a judicious application of mechanics, chemistry, and other
sciences may be made conducive to national prosperity.
A more accurate knowledge of the connection of physical phenomena will also
tend to remove the prevalent error that all branches of natural science are
not equally important in relation to general cultivation and industrial
progress. An arbitrary distinction is frequently made between the various
degrees of importance appertaining to mathematical sciences, to the study of
organized beings, the knowledge of electro-magnetism, and investigations of
the general properties of matter in its different conditions of molecular
aggregation; and it is not uncommon presumptuously to affix a supposed
stigma upon researches of this nature, by terming them "purely theoretical,"
forgetting , although the fact has been long attested, that in the
observation of a phenomenon, which at first sight appears to be wholly
isolated, may be concealed the germ of a great discovery.
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