Fragments of medical science and art : an address delivered before the Boylston Medical Society of Harvard University / by Henry Jacob Bigelow.

  • Henry Jacob Bigelow
Date:
1846
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Fragments of medical science and art : an address delivered before the Boylston Medical Society of Harvard University / by Henry Jacob Bigelow. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    would have leagued with his rebels, and driven me to desperation, had I not, when the veterans were routed and dispersed, at once sent into the field new forces of physical reasonings ; and having diligently learned where the captive had concealed himself, put myself without delay upon his track.” * Thus did he elaborate no less than six hypotheses upon the motions of the planet Mars, each rejected after tedious calculation, before he hit upon the assumption which accorded with the observations. And such were the attempts which led to Kepler’s laws, the great discovery of the age ; repeated suppositions made, to be compared with facts ; at once abandoned when their fallacy was shown. Kepler is not alone in his theorizing tendencies. Sin- gularly communicative, he has given us the story of his struggles after true conceptions. He says, ‘‘ If we not only pardon Christopher Columbus, Magellan, and the Portu- guese, when they narrate the wanderings in which they made their discoveries, but should lose much pleasure in reading were these omitted, let me not be blamed for following the same course in this work.” f But such mental efforts precede the discovery of every law in sci- ence. Every discoverer forms his hypothesis, and tests it by the truth ; if the facts are numerous, the inductive method, with its tabulating machinery, offers the surest and the shortest test; if, on the other hand, the facts are few in number, especially if. a law of cause is being tested by laws of phenomena, which then bear to it the relation of simple facts, I doubt if philosophers commonly have recourse to Bacon’s tables; but the process still em- bodies the soul of the inductive method. It is induction with its tablets in the memory, an analysis far more sub-- * Astron, Nov. p. 247. t Argum. Sing. Capit. Astron. Nov. 4