Part 22 (1/2)

I appear before you, Gentleree foreign from my habitual studies and pursuits, that it may be presumptuous in me to hope for a creditable execution of the task But I have not allowed considerations of this kind to weigh against a strong and ardent desire to signify my approbation of the objects, and my conviction of the utility, of this institution; and to manifest my prompt attention to whatever others may suppose to be in my power to prons

The constitution of the association declares its precise object to be, ”Mutual Instruction in the Sciences, as connected with the Mechanic Arts”

The distinct purpose is to connect science more and more with art; to teach the established, and invent new,the power of the hu in aid of the physical powers of the human frame; to facilitate the cooperation of the hten labor, andthe dominion of mind farther and farther over the ele those ele, and work together for huible creation into which we are introduced at our birth, is not, in all its parts, fixed and stationary Motion or change of place, regular or occasional, belongs to all or s which are around us Animal life everywhere moves; the earth itself has its motion, and its complexities ofor rushi+ng, to the sea; and the air which we breatheto the physical objects which surround us, is the exhaustless fountain whence philosophy draws the rees and endless forencies and the tendencies of inert ht to the succor and assistance of huth It is the object of mechanical contrivance to modify motion, to produce it in new forms, to direct it to new purposes, to multiply its uses, by its th could do without its aid, and to perforth, unassisted by art, could not perform

Motion itself is but the result of force; or, in other words, force is defined to be whatever tends to produce motion The operation of forces, therefore, on bodies, is the broad field which is open for that philosophical examination, the results of which it is the business offorces or sources of ravity, heat, the winds, and water There are various others of less power, or of more difficult application Mechanical philosophy, therefore, may be said to be that science which instructs us in the knowledge of naturalpowers, ani those powers, and of increasing the intensity of some of them by artificialthe varieties of force and encies, to the arts of life This is the object of h ie, or fail to see how suitable it is to the elevated rank and the dignity of reasoning beings Man's grand distinction is his intellect, his hly and peculiarly responsible to his Creator It is on account of this, that the rule over other animals is established in his hands; and it is this, mainly, which enables him to exercise dominion over the powers of nature, and to subdue them to hianization gives hi the most wonderful of the works of God on earth It contributes to cause, as well as prove, his elevated rank in creation His port is erect, his face toward heaven, and he is furnished with limbs which are not absolutely necessary to his support or locomotion, and which are at once powerful, flexible, capable of innumerable modes and varieties of action, and terminated by an instrument of wonderful, heavenly workmanshi+p,--the huives reat effect upon external objects, in pursuance of the suggestions of his understanding, and of applying the results of his reasoning power to his own purposes Without this particular forht have been endowed No bounteous grant of intellect, were it the pleasure of Heaven to rant, could raise any of the brute creation to an equality with the human race Were it bestowed on the leviathan, he must remain, nevertheless, in the element where alone he could maintain his physical existence He would still be but the inelegant,unwieldy, enorait”

Were the elephant made to possess it, it would but teach hihtliness of his fras,” his disability to act on externalnature of his own physical wants, which lead hiive him for his favorite ho of Babylon sufficiently out of the rank of hu faculties with hirass like an ox And this est to our consideration, what is undeniably true, that there is hardly a greater blessing conferred on man than his natural wants If he had wanted no more than the beasts, who can say how much more than they he would have attained? Does he associate, does he cultivate, does he build, does he navigate? The original impulse to all these lies in his wants It proceeds from the necessities of his condition, and from the efforts of unsatisfied desire Every want, not of a low kind, physical as well as moral, which the human breast feels, and which brutes do not feel and cannot feel, raises man by so much in the scale of existence, and is a clear proof and a direct instance of the favor of God towards his soIf , he would have wanted al

But doubtless the reasoning faculty, theand characteristic attribute of the hue of the properties of natural bodies This is science, properly and emphatically so called It is the science of pure h branches of this science lies the true sublime of human acquisition If any attaine, which, from the mensuration of thescale of , everywhere detecting and explaining the laws of force andinto the secret principles which hold the universe of God together, and balancing world against world, and systeainst system When we seek to accoh, so vast, and so exact; e arrive at the discoveries of Newton, which pour in day on the works of God, as if a second _fiat_ for light had gone forth from his own mouth; when, further, we atte his goal their starting-place, and, proceeding with demonstration upon de neorlds and new syste to learn all only because all is infinite; however we say of man, in ad he is express and admirable,” it is here, and here without irreverence, we may exclaim, ”In apprehension how like a God!” The study of the pure mathematics will of course not be extensively pursued in an institution, which, like this, has a direct practical tendency and aim But it is still to be remembered, that pure mathematics lie at the foundation of norance only which can speak or think of that sublime science as useless research or barren speculation

It has already been said, that the general and well-known agents usually regarded as the principal sources ofon solid bodies, the fall of water, which is but gravity acting on fluids, air, heat, and anith For the useful direction and application of the first four of these, that is, of all of the to inanimate nature, some intermediate apparatus or contrivance becomes necessary; and this apparatus, whatever its form, is a machine

A machine is an invention for the application ofpower, or by rendering a body in reater or less than its own to other bodies, or by enabling it to overcoreater intensity or force than its own And it is usually said that everyresolved into so to oneto another, three, called the mechanical powers But because machinery, or all mechanical contrivance, is thus capable of resolution into a few elementary forether, though pressed with the utree of human assiduity, will ever exhaust the combinations into which these eleh not an infinite, reach of invention may be expected; but indefinite, also, if not infinite, are the possible combinations of elementary principles The field, then, is vast and unbounded We know not to what yet unthought of heights the power of encies of nature may be carried We only know that the last half-century has witnessed an aress in useful discoveries, and that, at the present ether with a new co results The history ofsubject, and will doubtless be treated in this place fully and methodically, by stated lecturers

It is a part of the history of man, which, like that of his domestic habits and daily occupations, has been too seldo been thrust aside by thetopics of war and political revolutions We are not often conducted by historians within the houses or huts of our ancestors, as they were centuries ago, and made acquainted with their doements We see too little both of the conveniences and inconveniences of their daily and ordinary life There are, indeed, richdetails on these particulars to be collected frouet and Beckh and ritten history of those inventions in the mechanic arts which are now coacity, stimulated by human wants, seizes first on the nearest natural assistant The power of his own ar the studies of prith; and fro, for his own use, the strength of other animals A stone, ireater effect than the arm itself; this is a species of mechanical power The effect results froravity of a heavy body The limb of a tree is a rude, but powerful instru all discovered, like other natural qualities, by induction (I use the word as Bacon used it) or experience, and not by any reasoning _a priori_, their progress has kept pace with the general civilization and education of nations The history of ly illustrates in its general results the force of the hu pictures of ingenuity struggling with the conception of new coht, stretched to its uteneral principle from the indications of particular facts

We are now so far advanced beyond the age when the principal leading, important mathematical discoveries were e, that it is not easy to feel their importance, or be justly sensible what an epoch in the history of science each constituted The half-frantic exultation of Archi the crown of Hiero, was on an occasion and for a cause certainly well allowing very high joy And so also was the duplication of the cube

The altar of Apollo, at Athens, was a square block, or cube, and to double it, required the duplication of the cube This was a process involving an unascertained mathematical principle It was quite natural, therefore, that it should be a traditional story, that, by way of atoning for some affront to that God, the oracle commanded the Athenians to _double his altar_; an injunction, we knohich occupied the keen sagacity of the Greek geometricians for more than half a century, before they were able to obey it It is to the great honor, however, of this inienius seeations of science and the works of iination, that the immortal Euclid, centuries before our era, composed his Elements of Geometry; a hich, for two thousand years, has been, and still continues to be, a text-book for instruction in that science

A history of in with Greece There is a wonder beyond Greece Higher up in the annals of in of our race, out of all reach of letters, beyond the sources of tradition, beyond all history, except what reypt, the ypt! Thebes! the Labyrinth! the Pyraest? The Pyramids! Who can inform us whether it was by mere numbers, and patience, and labor, aided perhaps by the siotten combination of powers, by what now unknown ated to ranite seemed to cover the earth and reach the skies?

The ancients discovered s also to be discovered; and this, as a general truth, is what our posterity a thousand years hence will be able to say, doubtless, e and our generation shall be recorded also a the ancients For, indeed, God see, perpetual study to his intelligent creatures; where, ever learning, they can yet never learn all; and if that material universe shall last till man shall have discovered all that is now unknown, but which by the progressive i, it will reh a duration beyond human measurement, and beyond hu of our present systeebra, and, of course, nothing of the ieonorant of fluxions They had not attained to any just reat ation, and other branches of useful knowledge It is scarcely necessary to add, that they were ignorant of the great results which have followed the developravitation

In the useful and practical arts, many inventions and contrivances, to the production of which the degree of knowledge possessed by the ancients would appear to us to have been adequate, and which seein The application of water, for exa not known to have been accomplished at all in Greece, and is not supposed to have been atteustus The production of the same effect by wind is a still later invention It dates only in the seventh century of our era

The propulsion of the saw by any other power than that of the arland, so late as in the middle of the sixteenth century The Bishop of Ely, at that tiland to the Pope, says, ”he saw, at Lyons, a sawht wheel, and the water that h, which delivereth the same water to the wheels

This wheel hath a piece of timber put to the axletree end, like the handle of a _broch_ (a hand-organ), and fastened to the end of the sahich being turned with the force of water, hoisteth up and down the saw, that it continually eateth in, and the handle of the sa Also the tiht by little and little to the saith another vice”[89] From this description of the primitive power-saw, it would seem that it was probably fast only at one end, and that the broch and rigall performed the part of the arm in the common use of the handsaw

It must always have been a very considerable object forwater otherwise than bylike the co rude nations It has arrived at its present state only by slow and cautious steps of improvement; and, indeed, in that present state, however obvious and unattractive, it is so of an abstruse and refined invention It was unknown in China, until Europeans visited the ”Celestial Empire”; and is still unknown in other parts of Asia, beyond the pale of European settlements or the reach of European communication

The Greeks and Ronorant of it, in the early times of their history; and it is usually said to have come from Alexandria, where physical science was e of the Ptolemies

These few and scattered historical notices, Gentlemen, of important inventions, have been introduced only for the purpose of suggesting that there is much which is both curious and instructive in the history of s which to us, in our state of knowledge, seem so obvious as that we should think they would at once force themselves on men's adoption, have, nevertheless, been accomplished slowly and by painful efforts

But if the history of the progress of the , still more so, doubtless, would be the exhibition of their present state, and a full display of the extent to which they are now carried This field is much too wide to be entered on this occasion The briefest outline even would exceed its liularly fall to hands lance, however, must convince us that mechanical power and mechanical skill, as they are now exhibited in Europe and America, mark an epoch in human history worthy of all admiration Machinery is made to perform what has formerly been the toil of huuine, with a degree of power to which no number of human arms is equal, and with such precision and exactness as alence in the ly to the task The winds work, the waters work, the elasticity of ravity is solicited into a thousand new forms of action; levers are multiplied upon levers; wheels revolve on the peripheries of other wheels; the saw and the plane are tortured into an accommodation to new uses, and, last of all, with iniency of steam In comparison with the past, what centuries of ient comprised, in the short compass of fifty years! Everywhere practicable, everywhere efficient, it has an arer than that of Hercules, and to which hu a thousand tied to Briareus Steam is found in triumphant operation on the seas; and under the influence of its strong propulsion, the gallant shi+p,

”Against the wind, against the tide, Still _steadies_, with an upright keel”

It is on the rivers, and the boatins to exert itself along the courses of land conveyance; it is at the bottom of mines, a thousand feet below the earth's surface; it is in the mill, and in the workshops of the trades

It rows, it pumps, it excavates, it carries, it draws, it lifts, it hammers, it spins, it weaves, it prints It seems to say to men, at least to the class of artisans, ”Leave off your ive over your bodily toil; bestow but your skill and reason to the directing of roeary, no nerve to relax, no breast to feel faintness” What further improve power, it is impossible to know, and it were vain to conjecture What we do know is, that it has most essentially altered the face of affairs, and that no visible liress is seen to be impossible If its poere now to be annihilated, if ere to miss it on the water and in the es