51 LIMITATION AND SCIENTIFIC TREATMENT OF A PHYSICAL HISTORY OF CREATION. IN the general views with which I have opened my prolegomena to a survey of universal nature, I have sought to explain, and, by examples, to illustrate, how the enjoy ment of nature, diverse in its intimate sources, may be enhanced through clear ideas of the connection of her phenomena, and of the harmony that reigns among her actuating forces. It will now be my endeavour to enunciate more particularly the spirit and leading idea of the following scientific inquiry; carefully to separate from it all that is foreign; and with comprehensive brevity to convey the scope and contents of the doctrine of the Cosmos as I have apprehended and worked it out, after long years of study in various climates of the globe. Let me flatter myself with the hope that such an exposition will bear me out in the bold title I have given my work, and free me from the charge of presumption. My prolegomena comprise, under four divisions, and in consonance with my introductory remarks on the foundation of the laws of the universe, 1st. The conception and limitation of physical cosmography, as a separate and distinct science. 2d. The objective contents, the comprehensive empirical survey, of nature at large, in the scientific form of a general picture. 3d. The reflex action of nature upon the imagination and feelings, as stimulating to its study, through animated descriptions of remote countries, landscape poetry (a branch of modern literature), beautiful landscape painting, the cultivation and contrasted grouping of exotic plants, &c. - 4th. The history of creation, in other words, an account of the gradual development and extension of the idea of the Cosmos as a natural whole. The higher the point of view from which the phenomena of nature are contemplated, the more distinctly must the science, the foundations of which are now to be laid, be bounded, and marked off from all allied departments of natural knowledge. Physical Cosmography embraces the description of all that is created, of all that exists in space, both natural things and natural forces, as a simultaneously existing co-ordinate whole. It divides itself for man, the inhabitant of the earth, into two principal divisions; one telluric, another sidereal or uranological. To confirm the scientific independence of physical cosmography, and show its relations to other departmentsto physics or natural philosophy, to natural history or the special description of natural objects, to geognosy and comparative geography, or the description the earthwe shall first pause over the telluric portion of our subject. Even as little as the history of philosophy consists in a crude arrangement side by side, or in sequence, of the various philosophical opinions that have been entertained, so little is the telluric portion of cosmography any encyclopædic aggregate of the natural sciences enumerated above. The lines of demarcation between branches so intimately allied as these, are the more confused in consequence of the custom which has prevailed for centuries, of designating by specific titles certain groups of experimental knowledge, which are now too narrow, now too comprehensive for the matters comprised, and which, in times of classical antiquity, and in the languages from which they were borrowed, had a totally different signification from that now attached to them. The titles of particular natural sciences, such as anthropology, physiology, natural philosophy, natural history, geognosy, and geography, arose and became universally current before mankind had attained to any clear conception of the diversity of objects embraced by these several sciences, and the precise line of demarcation between each that is to say, of the grounds of separation themselves. In the language of one of the most polished nations of Europe, natural philosophy (physics) is scarcely distinguished from medicine (physic); whilst technical chemistry, geology, and astronomy, treated in an entirely empirical manner, are jumbled together, and papers on all are published under the joint title of PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS, by a Society whose fame is justly as wide as the world. Alterations of old, often ill chosen, but generally well understood names, for newer titles, have been repeatedly attempted, but always, as yet, with indifferent success, by those who have turned their attention to the classification of the several departments of human knowledge, from the Margarita Philosophica (a great Encyclopædia) of the Carthusian monk Gregory Reisch (1), to Bacon; from Bacon to d'Alembert, and, not to forget the very latest times, to the acute geometrician and natural philosopher, Ampère (2). The unfelicitous choice of a fantastical nomenclature has perhaps been more prejudicial to every attempt of the kind, than the excessive number of divisions and subdivisions that have been introduced. Physical cosmography, whilst it embraces the world" as an object of the external senses," requires, it is true, the association of general physics and natural history as auxiliary sciences; but the consideration of corporeal things, under the guise of a natural whole, moved and actuated by inherent forces, has an entirely special character as a distinct science. Physics occupies itself with the general properties of matter: it is an abstraction from the manifestations of force by matter; and in the very place where its first foundations, as a science, are laid, viz. in the eight books of the Physics of Aristotle (3), all the phenomena of nature are represented as vital manifestations of a general cosmic force. The telluric portion of physical cosmography, to which I willingly concede the old title, Physical History of the Globe, treats, among other matters, of the distribution of magnetism over our planet, with reference to intensity and direction; not of the laws of magnetical attraction and repulsion, nor of the means of exciting electro-magnetical effects, now of a more passing, now of a more permanent character. Physical cosmography displays, in bold outlines, the partitionings of continents and the distribution of their masses in either hemisphere-points that influence climate and the more important meteorological processes in the most remarkable manner; it goes farther-it indicates the prevailing characters of the several great mountain ranges, their extension in more continuous and even chains, or their connections in the manner of a grating, and their association with the several epochs and systems of formation; it determines the mean height of continents above the present level of the sea; the points of the centres of gravity of their volumes; the relations of the higher peaks of extensive chains to their acclivities, to neighbouring seas, and to the mineral nature of their constituent rocks; it informs us how these mountain masses, now active and moving, breaking through a superimposed crust, now passive and moved, present their strata under every variety of inclination-level, sloping, perpendicular; it considers the succession or isolation of volcanoes; the indications of their manifestations of activity, the extent of the circles they severally shake, and which in the course of centuries enlarge or contract. It farther informs us, to select a few examples from the conflict of the fluid with the solid, of the points of resemblance between all mighty streams in one part or another of their course: how they are liable to bifurcate, either in their superior or inferior channels; how at one time they cut across colossal mountain chains at right angles, at another, run in lines parallel to them, whether this be near the declension of the chain, or at some considerable distance from it, as a consequence of the influence which an elevated mountain system has exerted upon the surface of entire districts of country, and on the saline bot toms of neighbouring plains. Only the chief results of comparative orography and hydrography belong to the science |