The Southern Literary Messenger, Vol. II., No. 9, August, 1836Various
History
The Southern Literary Messenger, Vol. II., No. 9, August, 1836
Various
American literature -- 19th century -- Periodicals
On every hand philosophy still continues to push her conquests, and
discoveries crowd upon us. EHRENBERG has opened to us a new world in
his use of the microscope; those little insects, thousands of which
might stand on a needle's point, show to us how multiplied and how
minute the mechanism of the parts of living things may be. By feeding
these creatures on the purest carmine, and then bathing them in
distilled water, he has seen through their transparent bodies parts
which might rival for complexity the organs of the largest animals. In
another branch, FARADAY has explained all the phenomena of voltaic
electricity, in a series of experimental researches, unrivalled since
the time when Davy demonstrated that the alkalies and earths were
metallic oxides. In France, DUTROCHET has built up the doctrine of
Endosmose and capillary attraction, which has been extended in this
country, and furnished some remarkable results. The newly detected
facts of esormorphism and plescomorphism, are shaking chemistry and
mineralogy to their very foundation. The discovery of the mode of
polarising light—a subject upon which I propose to dwell at some
length, if time permits—has given us, to use the words of an eloquent
writer, new and infinitely refined perceptions of touch. We are
enabled, with mathematical precision, and demonstrative certainty, to
assign the exact form of atoms, millions of times beyond microscopic
power. We tremble upon the brink of discovering the elementary
constitution of the material world. We can feel as it were the
molecules of light itself, that most subtle of all fluids. We can
almost perceive their sides and their ends, and can actually control,
regulate and arrange the constituent parts of a _sunbeam_!
LIEBER'S MEMORIAL.
_Memorial of Francis Lieber, Professor of History and Political
Economy in the South Carolina College, relative to Proposals for a
Work on the Statistics of the United States._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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