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sumed laws, supply the explanation to the complex tangle of the course of events.

Finally, passing beyond the particular sciences of electromagnetism and light, we can generalize our point of view still further, and direct our attention to the growth of mathematical physics considered as one great chapter of scientific thought. In the first place, what in the barest outlines is the story of its growth?

It did not begin as one science, or as the product of one band of men. The Chaldean shepherds watched the skies, the agents of Government in Mesopotamia and Egypt measured the land, priests and philosophers brooded on the general nature of all things. The vast mass of the operations of nature appeared due to mysterious unfathomable forces. "The wind bloweth where it listeth" expresses accurately the blank ignorance then existing of any stable rules followed in detail by the succession of phenomena. In broad out line, then as now, a regularity of events was patent. But no minute tracing of their inter-connection was possible, and there was no knowledge how even to set about to construct such a science.

Detached speculations, a few happy or unhappy shots at the nature of things, formed the utmost which could be produced.

Meanwhile land-surveys had produced ge-

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