On the applications of science to human health and well-being. Being a lecture, introductory to a course, 'on the application of physics to common life', delivered to the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution, in June, 1847 / [Alexander Bain].

  • Alexander Bain
Date:
1848
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the applications of science to human health and well-being. Being a lecture, introductory to a course, 'on the application of physics to common life', delivered to the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution, in June, 1847 / [Alexander Bain]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    HUMAN HEALTH AND WELL-BEING. The science of Natural Philosophy, or Physics, may be familiarly chalked out, by saying, that it refers to Solids, Liquids, and Gases, —to Motion and Rest,—and to the four great Natural Powers, that we term Gravity or Weighty Heat, Electricity, and Light. In speaking of Solids, Liquids, and Airs or Gases, as a branch of Physics, we have in view the causes and laws of the Aggregation of bodies,—the influences that make them solid, liquid or aerial, and determine them to have one kind of solidity rather than another; rendering them hard or soft, brittle or tough, elastic or non-elastic, crystallised or otherwise. Since all material sub¬ stances, whether metal or stone, animate or inanimate, air or water, are made up of very small particles, surpassing in minuteness the finest dust or powder that we know of or can conceive, it is necessary that these particles should have the power of clinging to one another, in order to make such firm aggregates as the head of a hammer, the trunk of a tree, or a cable rope, or even to become a liquid mass, like water, which is a very different substance from the powder of water, as we see it in spray and in cloud; and although aerial bodies have no adhesion, they are just as different from powdery particles as the hardest solid is, being possessed of an active self-repelling tendency, which makes them spread out to the utmost limits that are allowed them. The accurate study, then, of these attractions and repulsions which give to bodies the peculiar state of aggregation belonging to each, is included in Physical Science; and all the regularities that have been found out concerning them, when systematically stated, make up one of the branches of Physics, under the title of the General Properties of Matter; these properties being universal, or attached to all bodies that we know ; that is to say, there is no substance in nature that retains at all times the powdery state ; every material that the earth supplies has the power of being, either a compact solid, a slightly adhesive liquid, or a self-repel¬ ling gas, and most bodies, can be any one of the three. The finest dust that is driven by the winds may fall to the ground, accumu-
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