produce mischievous compounds and destructive explosions.--Nevertheless good procedure remains good even when ignorant and the impetuous men make a bad use of it; and if we of to day resume the abortive effort of the eighteenth century, it should be within the guidelines they set out. ***** NOTES: [Footnote 3101: "Philosophioe naturalis principia," 1687; "Optics," 1704.] [Footnote 3102: See concerning this development Comte's "Philosophie Positive," vol. I.--At the beginning of the eighteenth century, mathematical instruments are carried to such perfection as to warrant the belief that all physical phenomena may be analyzed, light, electricity, sound, crystallization, heat, elasticity, cohesion and other effects of molecular forces.--See "Whewell's History of the Inductive Sciences. II., III.] [Footnote 3103: The travels of La Condamine in Peru and of Maupertuis in Lapland.] [Footnote 3104: Buffon, "Théorie de la terre," 1749; "Epoques de la Nature," 1788.--"Carte géologique de l'Auvergne," by Desmarets, 1766.] [Footnote 3105: See a lecture by M. Lacaze-Duthier on Lamarck, "Revue Scientifique," III. 276-311.] [Footnote 3106: Buffon, "Histoire Naturelle, II. 340: "All living beings contain a vast quantity of living and active molecules. Vegetal and animal life seem to be only the result of the actions of all the small lives peculiar to each of the active molecules whose life is primitive." Cf. Diderot, "Revue d'Alembert."] [Footnote 3108: "Philosophie de Newton," 1738, and "Physique," by Voltaire.--Cf. du Bois-Raymond, "Voltaire physician," (Revue des Cours Scientifique, V. 539), and Saigey, "la Physique de Voltaire,"--"Had Voltaire," writes Lord Brougham, "continued to devote himself to experimental physics he would undoubtedly have inscribed his name among those of the greatest discoverers of his age."] [Footnote 3109: See his "Langue des Calculs," and his "Art de Raisonner."] [Footnote 3110: For a popular exposition of these ideas see Voltaire, passim, and particularly the "Micromégas" and "Les Oreilles du Comte de Chesterfield."] [Footnote 3111: Cf. Buffon, ibid.. I. 31: "Those who imagine a reply with final causes do not reflect that they take the effect for the cause. The relationship which things bear to us having no influence whatever on their origin, moral convenience can never become a physical explanation."--Voltaire, "Candide": "When His High Mightiness sends a vessel to Egypt is he in any respect embarrassed about the comfort of the mice that happen to be aboard of it?"]