Thomas Sterry Hunt

“ The teachers, under such conditions, can do little more than interpret to their pupils so much of the wisdom of the past, and of contemporary science, as may suffice for the immediate wants of the country, and will have but scanty leisure for original investigation in the field of knowledge. There are, however, never wanting earnest and curious minds who feel an almost irresistible impulse to labor in this field, to enlarge the bounds of thought, and to grapple with the great problems of man and nature. ”

“ It is good and praiseworthy to labor to extract the metal from the ore, and the healing essence from the plant, to subdue the powers of electricity and of steam to the service of man. To those who attain these ends the world gives its substantial rewards; but far higher honors are instinctively rendered to those who by their disinterested researches, undertaken without hope of recompense, have revealed to us the great laws which serve to guide the searchers in these fields of technical science ”

“ It is a common reproach in the mouths of certain cavilers at science that it does not explain the beginnings of life in matter. That the plant and the animal are living, is evident to them, but they assume that the air, the water, and the earth, the elements from which the plant grows and is fed, are dead; that life is a mysterious something which comes from without, and is extraneous to the organism. ”

“ It will be noticed that in this brief survey of the field of natural knowledge I have not spoken of the technical applications of science, nor alluded to its important aspects in relation to the material wants of life. On this theme, did time permit, I might speak at length. There are two classes of motives which urge men to the pursuit of knowledge; on the one hand, those of worldly fame or profit, and, on the other, the far nobler sentiment which has the finding-out of truth for its object. ”

“ The student of inorganic nature, however, soon learns to recognize the fact that all matter is instinct with activities, and finds that a great number of those processes which were formerly regarded as functions of organized bodies are really common to these and to inorganic matter. The phenomena of gravitation, of light, and of electricity, the diffusion and transpiration of gases and liquids, the crystallogenic process, and the peculiar relations of colloids, are all, when rightly understood, manifestations of energies and activities which forbid us to speak of matter as dead. ”

“ Apart from pure mathematic, which is based upon our intuitions of space, the sciences which now concern us have to do with material nature, and are properly called natural sciences. It is not their province to look behind or beyond the material world of nature, nor to grapple with the mystery of the Infinite, with which, in the last analysis, the inquirer always finds himself face to face. ”

“ The world's intellectual workers are, from the very nature of their lives of thought and study, separated in some degree from the mass of mankind. They feel, however, not less than others, the need of human sympathy and co-operation, and out of this need have grown academies and learned societies devoted to the cultivation of letters and of science. ”

“ With this method of study in the organic kingdoms we are familiar under the names of physiological botany and physiological zoölogy, which concern themselves with anatomy, organography, and morphology, and with the processes of growth, nutrition, and decay in organized existences. The natural philosophy of the inorganic world investigates the motions and the energies of the heavenly bodies, and then, coming down to our planet, considers all the phenomena which come under the head of dynamic or physic, as well as those of chemistry. ”

“ It is not until solid matter rises from the crystalline to the higher condition of the colloid, that it becomes capable of absorption, diffusion, and even of assimilation; that, in a word, it assumes relations to the external world which show that it possesses an individuality higher than the cyrstal, and is, in fact, endowed with many of the activities belonging to those masses of colloidal matter which biologists have agreed to call living. ”

“ In the material as in the moral order, the promise of achievement is given to those who strive after knowledge and wisdom irrespective of the hope of temporal reward; and the history of science shows that it is such seekers as these who have attained to the discovery of those secrets which have been of the greatest benefit to humanity. ”

“ Goethe makes the world-spirit say, "the living garment of the Deity." This phrase embodies a profound truth. All nature is living; it is, as the word natura itself, equally with its Greek equivalent, physis, implies, that which is growing, the perpetually-becoming or being born ”

“ The study of nature in its details presents itself to the mind in a twofold aspect—as historical and as philosophical. The first of these gives rise to a General Physiography or description of nature, which we commonly call Natural History as applied to each of the three great divisions designated as the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms. ”

“ The decomposition of bodies by heat is, moreover, assimilated to the phenomenon of volatilization: the rate of decomposition at a given temperature varying with the pressure, and with the nature of the atmosphere which surrounds the unstable body. ”

“ The attaining of individuality by matter, which has always seemed to me the greatest step in the progress of nature, is first seen in the crystal, but therein the forces of matter are in a statical condition, except so far as certain dynamical relations are concerned. ”

“ Our various metaphysical systems are schemes which men have devised to solve this mighty problem, and to translate into intelligible language their efforts to comprehend it. What we call Nature is at once a mantle and a veil in which the spiritual both clothes and conceals itself. ”

“ To foster this spirit, to encourage its beginnings, and to extend the influence of its example, should be the aim of wise statesmen and legislators who seek to elevate their kind and ennoble their nation; knowing that the brightest glories and the most enduring honors of a country are those which come from its thinkers and its scholars. ”

“ Science and letters find but few votaries in a country like this, where the best energies of its thinkers are necessarily directed to devising means of subduing the wilderness, opening the ways of communication, improving agriculture, building up industries, and establishing upon a proper basis schools in which the youth of the country may be instructed in those arts and professions which are among the first needs of civilized society. ”

“ If now we admit, as I am disposed to do with Mattieu Williams, that our atmosphere and ocean are not simply terrestrial, but cosmical, and are a portion of the medium which, in an attenuated form, fills the interstellary spaces, these same nebulae and their resulting worlds may be evolved by a process of chemical condensation from this universal atmosphere, to which they would sustain a relation somewhat analogous to that of clouds and rain to the aqueous vapor around us. ”

“ It is not necessary to recall to you the marvelous field of celestial chemistry which the spectroscope, in the hands of Kirchhoff and his followers, has made known to us, nor the proofs that the solar atmosphere contains in a dissociated state very many of the elements which in our own planet are met with in a free state only in the laboratory of the chemist. ”

“ In the department of the sciences, however, there is no natural basis for a similar division, and it will probably be found in the near future that subjects of common interest will draw more and more closely together our two sections until, as in the various societies which we have named, the distinction between mathematical, physical, and chemical studies on the one hand, and geological and biological studies on the other, will be lost sight of. ”

“ The unit of natural existence is neither force nor matter, but sentience, and through this all the material and dynamic phenomena of nature may be explained." From the unifications of these sensitive principles, or elementary souls, which take place in the combinations of matter, higher and higher manifestations of sentience appear, constituting the various activities displayed in crystals, in plants, and in animals. ”

“ The cosmos is not, as some would have it, a vast machine wound up and set in motion with the certainty that it will run down like a clock, and arrive at a period of stagnation and death. The modern theory of thermodynamic, though perhaps true within its limitations, has not yet grasped the problem of the universe. ”

“ In these phenomena we have the first developments of individuality and of organization, and I think that the careful student who endeavors with a strong mental grasp to seize the true relations of things will see that we have here to do, not with a new activity from without, but with a new and higher development of a force which is inherent in matter, and thus manifests itself at a certain stage in chemical development. ”

“ They still regulate alike the terrestrial, the oceanic, and the aerial circulation, and preside over the constant change and decay by which the surface of the earth is incessantly renewed and the conditions necessary to organic life are maintained." [3] Thus the physiological study of the inorganic world, or in other words its natural philosophy, includes in its scope at once theoretical astronomy and theoretical geology or geogeny. ”

“ This same section has also been made to include mathematic, which in itself does not belong to the domain of natural science, though in its applications it becomes an indispensable instrument in the study of nature; whether we investigate the phenomena of physic or of chemistry, or seek to comprehend the laws which regulate alike the order of the celestial spheres, the shapes of crystals, and the forms of vegetation. ”

“ Is it not possible that we have here that more elemental form of matter which, though not seen in the nebulæ, is liberated by the intense heat of the solar sphere, and may possibly correspond to the primary matter conjectured by Dumas, having an equivalent weight one-fourth that of hydrogen? ”

“ The second class of our society, with its two sections, aspires to cover the same ground as the Academy of Sciences of the Institute of France, the Science division of the Royal Irish Academy, the Royal Society of London, and the National Academy of Sciences of the United States. ”

“ All matter quick, and bursting into birth." The adjective, quick, is here to be understood in its primitive sense of living, as opposed to dead, and aptly defines the notion which I have endeavored to convey. ”

“ According to him, in the words of his interpreter, Davidson, "the ultimate atoms of matter are animate; each atom having united with it, and forming its unity or atomicity, a sensitive principle. When atoms chemically combine, their sensitive principles become one. ”

“ The second aspect of the study of nature, which we have designated as philosophical, regards the logic of nature, or what the older writers spoke of as General Physiology. This is sometimes appropriately termed Natural Philosophy, a designation which is the correlative of Natural History. ”

“ The records of these bodies in Florence, in Rome, in Paris, in London, and elsewhere, are the records of scientific progress for the last three centuries. Such bodies do not create thinkers and workers, but they give to them a scientific home, a center of influence, and the means of making known to the world the results of their labors. ”

“ From these elementary souls organic souls are built up, and "when these are redissolved into the elementary ones through the dissolution of the organized bodies, the existence of the souls does not cease, but is merely transformed." ”

“ They are the geogenic agencies which in the course of ages have molded the mineral mass of the earth, and from primeval chaos have evolved its present order, formed its various rocks, filled the veins in its crust with metals, ores, gems, and spars, and determined the composition of its waters and its atmosphere. ”

“ Our infant organization attempts a larger plan, and embraces, with the mathematical and physical sciences, letters, philosophy, and history, imitating the Royal Irish Academy, which, like this, is divided into two classes ”

“ In the first, with a predominance of hydrogen, we see only faint lines of magnesium, sodium, calcium, iron, and a few other metals, while in the second, though free hydrogen still abounds, the number of metallic elements is greatly augmented, and finally in the red stars hydrogen is seen only in combination, as aqueous vapor, the metals are wanting, and the metalloids and their compounds appear. ”