Εικόνες σελίδας
PDF
Ηλεκτρ. έκδοση

ROYAL INSTITUTE OF FRANCE.

Reflections on the progress of the Sciences, and on their relations with Society, by the Chevalier CUVIER, perpetual Secretary of the Academy of Sciences, for the Physical Sciences; read at the public sitting of inauguration on the 24th April, 1816.

Translated by H. PATILLO, Esq. of Baltimore

At the time when the Academy of Sciences received from Louis XIV. the form which the august successor of that monarch this day restores to us, in a solemnity similar to that which now brings us together, the ingenious historian of that body would not permit himself without a degree of reserve, to advance the opinion that the labours of his fellow-members might not be so entirely useless as they were considered in his own time.

Now, we may hold a language less timid, or rather, we may speak with boldness.

The success, which has of late years attended the observation of nature, the study of her resources and her laws,-has excited an interest in their history, and we have collected from it more enlarged ideas of their power and utility.

The first savages collected in the forests a few nourishing fruits, a few salutary roots, and thus supplied their most immediate wants; the first shepherds observed that the stars move in a regular course, and made use of them to guide their journies across the plains of the desert; such was the origin of the mathematical, and such of the physical sciences.

Once convinced that it could combat nature by the means which she herself afforded, genius reposed no more; it watched her without relaxation; it incessantly made new conquests over her, all of them distinguished by some improvement in the situation of our

race.

From that time a succession of conducting minds, faithful deposi tories of the attainments already made, constantly occupied in connecting them, in vivifying them by means of each other, have conducted us, in less than forty ages, from the first essays of rude observers, to the profound calculations of Newton and Laplace, to the learned classifications of Linnæus and Jussieu. This precious inheritance, perpetually increasing, brought from Chaldea into Egypt, from Egypt into Greece, conceal

We have seen them if not create society, at least grow, and expand with it, procuring to the latter in succession all its enjoyments; sometimes completely transposing its elements; and from what they have done, it has not been difficult to foresee what they might still do. Thrown weak and naked on the surface of the globe, man appeared created for inevitable destruction; evils assailed him on every side; the remedies remained hiddened during ages of disaster and of from him;-but, he had been endowed with genius to discover them.

darkness, recovered in more fortunate times, unequally spread among the nations of Europe, has

every where been followed by wealth and power; the nations who have reaped it are become the mistresses of the world; such as have neglected it, are fallen into weakness and obscurity.

It is true that for a long time, even those who were so fortunate as to reveal any important truths, did not clearly perceive the great relations by which all truths are united, nor the infinite consequences which may flow from each.

And, indeed, it could not be expected that those Phoenician sailors who saw the sand of the shores of Botica transformed by fire into a transparent glass, should have at once foreseen that this new substance would prolong the pleasures of sight to the old; that it would one day assist the astronomer in penetrating the depths of the heavens, and in numbering the stars of the milky way; that it would lay open to the naturalist a miniature world as populous, as rich in wonders as that which alone seemed to have been granted to his senses and his contemplation; in fine, that the most simple and direct use of it would enable the inhabitants of the coast of the Baltic sea, to build palaces more magnificent than those of Tyre and Memphis, and to cultivate, almost under the frost of the polar circle, the most delicious fruits of the torrid zone.

it impossible that civilized coun tries should ever again be the prey of barbarous nations; to become, in a word, one of the great causes of the propagation of knowledge, by rendering knowledge necessary to conquering nations, who had in almost every instance been the sconrges of it; such was the destination of one of the most simple chemical combinations.

These consequences now strike every eye; but the most piercing sight could not have discovered them in the commencement, when every one was content with following the path which chance had opened to him; it was almost unconsciously that these first observers became the benefactors of their race.

The principle and the immense advantage of the present progress of the sciences, consist in the cessation of this insulated state.

The different roads have met; those who travelled on them have created for themselves a common language; their different doctrines, by gradual dilatation, at length touch, and lending a mutual sup port, proceeding on the same great line, they embrace, as it were, all existence in its universality.

By thus elevating herself above every thing, science has been enabled to inspect every thing; all the arts are subjected to her; in dustry acknowledges her as its regulator; she has assisted and protected man in all his modes of being and employment, and she has connected herself in the most intimate and perceptible manner, with all the relations of society.

When a pious monk, in the seclusion of a German cloister, first set fire to a mixture of sulphur and saltpetre, what mortal could have predicted to him the consequences which would arise from Even before she had attained his experiment? To change the this elevation, it was not difficult art of war; to deprive mere physi- to perceive that her observations, cal strength of its superiority over those in appearance the most humcourage; to re-establish the autho-ble and indifferent, might give rise rity of kings in the west; to render to changes as important as unex

[ocr errors]

pected in social habits, in commerce, and the public weal.

A botanist whose name is hardly known, brought tobacco from the new world to Europe about the time of the league. This plant now furnishes to France alone the subject of a tax of fifty millions; the other nations of Europe draw -resources from it in the same proportion; even in Turkey and Persia it is become a considerable article of commerce and agricul

ture.

Another botanist, in the time of the regency, transported to Marti-nique a coffee-plant, an Arabian shrub, the use of which had only commenced in Europe about the beginning of the reign of Louis XIV. This single plant has yielded all those of our islands; it has enriched the colonists. The use of this grain is now become common, and certainly it has been more efficacious than all the eloquence of moralists in destroying the abuse of wine among the upper classes -of society.

Who can answer that even now our botanical gardens do not contain some neglected herb, destined to produce quite as great revolutions in our customs and political economy?

And what places in a very distinct class, the revolutions which the sciences occasion, is, that they are always fortunate.

They combat other revolutions: it is the opposition of two principles; the war of Orosmades against Arimanius.

When a fatal negligence had abandoned our forests to destrucstion, natural philosophy improved our fire-places. When the jealousy of other nations deprived us of foreign productions, chemistry made them grow in our soil. The nations of Europe seem never to have la

boured with more ardour to destroy their means of subsistence than during the last twenty years! How many famines would not the devastations which we have witnessed have formerly produced? Botany had provided against them; she had gone beyond the seas to seek out new plants for our nourishment; she had taken advantage of every bad year to recommend the propagation of them, and had at length succeeded in rendering a famine impossible.

Further yet; to see how fortunate inventions occur at the moment when the sufferings of humanity require them, it would seem that Providence holds in reserve the beneficent discoveries of the sciences to counterbalance the disastrous ingenuity of ambition. Inoculation came into use shortly after the scourge of standing ar mies; and at the time of the still more dreadful scourge of the conscription, the unexpected miracles of vaccination seemed intended to

console the world.

And, we feel a pleasure in repeating that benefits so great, so numerous, have been justly appreciated; they have been proclaimed with eclat; and in this respect, the sciences and those who cultivate them have no cause to complain of our contemporaries.

But the men who do them justice do not all entertain ideas equally exact of the causes of their progress, nor of the proper means of encouraging them.

Some who confound different times, imagine that we might still content ourselves with such parts of science as are immediately useful; others considering all lofty theories as barren exercises of the mind, are afraid that by deadening the imagination, they may contract the understanding, and would wish

to confine them among those to whom their profession renders them indispensable.

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 abstraction which 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

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 sentiments and the same passions, prescribes to the art of governing men as well as to that of delight. ing. 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 illustrate 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 pre-heat, has made it the most powercision 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.

ful 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.

« ΠροηγούμενηΣυνέχεια »