The Baconian precept, to "torture Nature out of her secrets," has been,
and ever must be, abortive of the good intended. Nature is performing
freely and openly every hour, without making us wiser, and as little
while she is operating in our own experiments. Her language, of which
_inertia_ and _pressure_ are the alpha and omega, is not studied;
nor does it mislead or flatter like our own. Experiments innumerable
have been performed; the _experimentum crucis_ resorted to; the screw
applied to the utmost pinch, without either confession or concealment
on Nature's part. Hence, the experimenter is left to make his own
philosophy of the case, of which the next operator makes a different;
and all are falsely interpreted that violate the principle of inertia,
which all do. Aristotle, Bacon, Newton, Black, Reid, Davy, Des Cartes,
experimented indefatigably under the most favourable auspices,--exalted
talent, and the institutions of the world at command; but all on
false principles; yet Nature, tortured or not, left them to their own
mis-interpretations. Aristotle, true in his opinion of motion, was
himself ignorant of the cause of continuous motion, or all would not
be so at present. Bacon recommended experiment, without teaching the
natural mode of interpretation. Newton spent his valuable time, to the
world's great loss, in experimenting on light, in ascertaining and
describing its properties, as if there were material light; instead of
which, light is a mere sensible effect; hence, a physical nonentity.
Black and Reid called to their assistance all the powers of numbers,
to ascertain and prove the quantity of heat in the animal system, and
of cold in ice; but could not torture Nature out of the information,
that heat and cold do not belong to matter or bodies, as a knowledge of
the function of the senses could have informed them. Davy travelled to
Skehallean to find from the size of the hill, a ratio of attraction,
whence to calculate the quantity of attraction in the entire globe of
the earth: at home, correctly sought, he would have found, without
numerical assistance and the pendulum, that the amount is zero. The
deflection of the pendulum was caused by the pressure on one side of
the bulb being greater than on the side facing the hill; which, from
varying hourly with the sun's altitude, should have told him that the
deflection is a mere weather-deviating circumstance.
On the other hand, who perceives the natural truths elicited by even
his own experiments! That truly great philosopher, Priestly, remained
ignorant that his own experiments on blood and air brought to light
the principle on which the blood is arterialized, without coming in
contact with the air in the lungs; of which experiments the faculty are
reprehensibly ignorant at present; also the principle of congelation
without cold. It is a general error that men must be philosophers
because they are mathematicians and first-rate experimenters, yet do
not know what keeps the blood in motion, nor how water becomes ice.
What experiment was ever so absurdly illustrated as that of ice formed
in the midst of fire; which is explained by, "evaporation generating
cold in a red-hot crucible," and while maintaining that cold is only
the absence of heat. The _rationale_ is: the oxygen of water is the
hindrance to congelation, which the evaporation carries off, and the
remaining elements of the water are compressed into ice. What are the
elementary constituents of water, has yet to be learned. Misled by
false-directing philosophy, the analysis of a rotten potato, in quest
of the cause of the vegetable epidemic, is as wise as were the same
scientific procedure taken on the contents of a pustule to discover the
cause of the small pox: the result in both cases must be a complete
new formation; and in the former, the result could be no preventive
information whatever to the planter. To convince planters and remove
all timidity, every garden owner should plant an experimental patch
with potato _peelings_, each having an eye; the crop is certain and
good, and supplies the cottager with the next year's seed at no
expense. The _cutting_ for seed may be of exhausted vegetating power,
while the peeling of even the same potato may be as sound as ever. The
badly grown potatoes of the previous crop caused those of the following
to be of imperfect growth and perishable: hence the general potato-rot.