PHYSICAL AND MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES. 39 1

manifestly wanting, but which we are thus precludedfrom supplying.

There is one consideration which alone affords us anysatisfaction for the unforeseen deficiency under whichthis portion of our history labours, — the circumstancethat all these topics are, in fact, embodied in the differenttreatises of the Cabinet Cyclopcedia upon the severalbranches of physical science. T o enumerate and explainthe series of recent discoveries by which those scienceshave been brought to their existing state of complete-ness, would be little else than to engage in systematicdescriptions of the entire sciences. And when we havetraced the progress by which the first principles of phi-losophic truth were originally fixed, and the first greatadvances made in the developement of the laws of thematerial world, the discussion of the successive improve-ments upon those principles would be little differentfrom the actual exposition of the facts and theorieswhose aggregate constitutes the systematic scheme ofthe different departments. To these several treatises,then, we must be content to refer our readers to collectthe recent history of scientific discovery.