because the laboratory is a "study" in which symbols give place to natural facts. The word Mesopotamia is said to have a sacred unction for many minds, and possibly the title of my "Inaugural Dissertation" at Marburg may have an effect of this kind on my right reverend and reverend critics of the new mathematical school. Here accordingly it is: "Die Schraubenfläche mit geneigter Erzeugungslinie, und die Bedingungen des Gleichewichts auf solchen Schrauben." A little tenderness may, perhaps, flow toward me, after these words have made it known that I began my narrow scientific life less as an experimentalist than as a mathematician.
If, as asserted, "the highest mathematical intellects of the Association disclaim and repudiate the theories of its president," it would be their bounden duty to not rest content with this mere second-hand utterance. They ought to permit the light of life to stream upon us directly from themselves, instead of sending it through the polemoscope[1] of Dr. Reichel. But the point of importance to be impressed upon him, and upon those who may be tempted to follow him in his adventurous theories, is, that out of mathematics no salvation for theology can possibly come.
By such reflections I am brought face to face with an essay to which my attention has been directed by several estimable, and indeed eminent persons, as demanding serious consideration at my hands. I refer with pleasure to the complete accord subsisting between the Rev. James Martineau and myself on certain points of biblical cosmogony. "In so far," says Mr. Martineau, "as church belief is still committed to a given cosmogony and natural history of man, it lies open to scientific refutation." And again: "It turns out that with the sun and moon and stars, and in and on the earth, before and after the appearance of our race, quite other things have happened than those which the sacred cosmogony recites." Once more: "The whole history of the genesis of things Religion must surrender to the Sciences." Finally, still more emphatically: "In the investigation of the genetic order of things, Theology is an intruder, and must stand aside." This expresses, only in words of fuller pith, the views which I ventured to enunciate in Belfast. "The impregnable position of Science," I there say, "may be stated in a few words. We claim, and we shall wrest from Theology, the entire domain of cosmological theory." Thus Theology, so far as it is represented by Mr. Martineau, and Science, so far as I understand it, are in absolute harmony here.
But Mr. Martineau would have just reason to complain of me, if, by partial citation, I left my readers under the impression that the agreement between us is complete. At the opening of the eighty-ninth session of the Manchester New College, London, on October 6, 1874, Mr. Martineau delivered the Address from which I have quoted. It
- ↑ "An oblique perspective glass, for seeing objects not directly before the eyes."—Webster.
