Volume 1

William Whewell, D.D., Master of Trinity College, Cambridge : an account of his writings with selections from his literary and scientific correspondence / by I. Todhunter.

  • Isaac Todhunter
Date:
1876
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: William Whewell, D.D., Master of Trinity College, Cambridge : an account of his writings with selections from his literary and scientific correspondence / by I. Todhunter. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    414/456 (page 378)
    mainly of compositions of Dr Whewell’s earlier years; the re- mainder of the present Chapter belongs to his later years.] As the result of the train of reflection which I have been describing I resolved, as I have said, to devote myself to the study of meteoric stones—stones which had fallen or were supposed to have fallen from the skies upon the earth. This subject acquired a new and fascinating interest for me in the recent years of which I have mainly to speak and was the occasion of the strange ad- ventures which I have to describe. But of such stones I had known something for many years and of the oscillations of scien- tific opinion concerning them. When I was an undergraduate at Cambridge about 1813, I attended the mineralogical lectures of the celebrated Edward Daniel Clarke, then just returned from his travels which had extended from the Baltic to the Crimea and the Mediterranean. Certainly Clarke was one of the most striking characters belonging to the Cambridge life of that my early time. He was very eloquent:—I should say the most naturally eloquent man I have heard : that is, he gave to what he said all the charm that fluency, earnestness and fine delivery could give, independent of its meaning and purport, which often could not bear a close examination. He was not a profound or exact man of science, but he had a good knowledge of what was doing in the world of science, and undaunted courage in endeavouring to take his share in it. He very nearly blew himself to pieces once or twice in his experiments with his oxyliydrogen blowpipe. He on returning to the University after his travels began to deliver a course of lectures on Mineralogy, which were very attractive, for in them he introduced stories and discussions about all that he had seen and heard of in the course of his travels. Among other things he spoke of meteoric stones. The celebrated mass of meteoric iron which Pallas had seen in Siberia and had described in his Travels, had then recently drawn general attention to the subject. Clarke had of course a theory on the subject of these stones. I do not know if any one now maintains that theory. He held that as all substances can exist in a gaseous state, the components of these stones might occur, in a gaseous state, in the higher regions of