Address of S. P. Langley: President of the American Association (Classic Reprint) - Couverture souple

Langley, S. P.

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1331993369 ISBN 13 : 9781331993360

Editeur : Forgotten Books, 2018

A propos du livre

Reseña del editor :

Excerpt from Address of S. P. Langley: President of the American Association

I should need to abbreviate and injure in order to quote; but did ever a learned physical treatise and collection of useful tables begin like this before?

I was born at Parma, and when I got a holiday used to go into the Country the night before, and go to bed early, so as to get up before the dawn. Then I used to steal silently out of the house, and run, with bounding heart, till I got to the top of a little hill, where I used to set myself so as to look toward the East. There, he tells us, he used, in the stillness of nature, to wait the rising sun, and feel his attention rapt, less with the glorious spectacle of the morning light itself than with the sense of the mysterious heat which accompanied its beams, and brought something more noces sary to our life and that of all nature than the light itself, so that the idea that not only mankind, but nature, would perish though the light continued, if this was divorced from heat, made a profound impression, he tells us, on his childish mind.

The statement that such an idea could enter with dominating force into the mind of a child will perhaps seem improbable to most. It will, however, be credible enough to some here, I have no doubt.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Reseña del editor :

Excerpt from Address of S. P. Langley: President of the American Association

It is not for us, then, here to-day, to try

"How index-learning tarns no student pale,
Yet holds the eel of science by the tall;"

but, on the contrary, to remark that from this index-learning, from these histories of science and summaries of its progress, we are apt to get wrong ideas of the very conditions on which this progress depends. We often hear it, for instance, likened to the march of an army toward some definite end; but this, it has seemed to me, is not the way science usually does move, but only the way it seems to move in the retrospective view of the compiler, who probably knows almost nothing of the real confusion, diversity, and retrograde motion of the individuals comprising the body, and only shows us such parts of it as he, looking backward from his present standpoint, now sees to have been in the right direction.

I believe this comparison of the progress of science to that of an army, which obeys an impulse from one head, has more error than truth in it; and, though all similes are more or less misleading, I would prefer to ask you to think rather of a moving crowd, where the direction of the whole comes somehow from the independent impulses of its individual members; not wholly unlike a pack of hounds, which, in the long-run, perhaps catches its game, but where, nevertheless, when at fault, each individual goes his own way, by scent, not by sight, some running back and some forward; where the louder-voiced bring many to follow them, nearly as often in a wrong path as in a right one; where the entire pack even has been known to move off bodily on a false scent; - for this, if a less dignified illustration, would be one which had the merit of having a truth in it, left out of sight by the writers of text-books.

At any rate, the actual movement has been tortuous, or often even retrograde, to a degree of which you will get no idea from the account in the text-book or encyclopædia, where, in the main, only the resultant of all these vacillating motions is given.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Forgotten Books
• Date d'édition: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1331993369
• ISBN 13: 9781331993360
• Reliure: Tapa blanda
• Nombre de pages: 30