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Nevertheless, we felt so strongly how unfitting it would be to offer such mere personal observations as proofs, that we have carefully refrained from admitting any example which is not open to the observation of almost every one.

This is a drawback which we feel greatly; it reduces our instances to a hundredth part of those which might be adduced; but we must submit to it, only asking of the reader’s generosity to take it into account. Another favour which we beg is, that the reader will suspend his judgment until the subject is concluded, and he has the whole system, with all its proofs, before him.

We scruple not to admit, that at present the system is incomplete. We rather court inquiry, and solicit additional facts, than peremptorily dogmatize on conclusions drawn from our own limited—though extensive—number of observations. But it is so much the fashion for every wild theorist to dogmatize on his theory, and insist upon it, per fas et nefas, as perfect, unassailable, and complete, that it is almost deemed reprehensible to suggest a notion for the consideration of the world, or to propound anything which the author is modest enough to admit is improvable. Such, however, was not the manner of the true philosophers of former days. If Copernicus had delayed propounding the system of the universe which bears his name, until he could explain by it all the planetary and sidereal motions, it might have slumbered unknown for another century or two, and so we should not yet have arrived at our present enlarged understanding of it. If Bacon had waited for a complete Natural History, ere he published his Novum Organum, we might still have been groping after the Sciences with the dark lantern of Aristotle and the schools. If Newton had withheld his theory of Light until he could burn a diamond, our knowledge of the nature of light might still be in its infancy.