of the sciences, there are few episodes more instructive than the collision between Laplace and Young with regard to the theory of capillarity. The precise and intricate mathematical analysis of Laplace, starting from fixed preconceptions regarding atomic forces which were to remain intact throughout the logical development of the argument, came into contrast with the tentative, mobile intuitions of Young; yet the latter was able to grasp, by sheer direct mental force, the fruitful though partial analogies of this recondite class of phenomena with more familiar operations of nature, and to form a direct picture of the way things interacted, such as could only have been illustrated, quite possibly damaged or obliterated, by premature effort to translate it into elaborate analytical formulas. The aperçus of Young were apparently devoid of all cogency to Laplace; while Young expressed, doubtless in too extreme a way, his sense of the inanity of the array of mathematical logic of his rival. The subsequent history involved the Nemesis that the fabric of Laplace was taken down and reconstructed in the next generation by Poisson; while the modern cultivator of the subject turns, at any rate in England, to neither of those expositions for illumination, but rather finds in the partial
