in-door life, from the improved kitchen-range up to the stereoscope on
the drawing-room table, the applications of advanced physics underlie
our comforts and gratifications.

Still more numerous are the applications of Chemistry. The bleacher, the
dyer, the calico-printer, are severally occupied in processes that are
well or ill done according as they do or do not conform to chemical
laws. Smelting of copper, tin, zinc, lead, silver, iron, must be guided
by chemistry. Sugar-refining, gas-making, soap-boiling,
gunpowder-manufacture, are operations all partly chemical; as are
likewise those which produce glass and porcelain. Whether the
distiller's wort stops at the alcoholic fermentation or passes into the
acetous, is a chemical question on which hangs his profit or loss; and
the brewer, if his business is extensive, finds it pay to keep a chemist
on his premises. Indeed, there is now scarcely any manufacture over some
part of which chemistry does not preside. Nay, in these times even
agriculture, to be profitably carried on, must have like guidance. The
analysis of manures and soils; the disclosure of their respective
adaptations; the use of gypsum or other substance for fixing ammonia;
the utilisation of coprolites; the production of artificial manures--all
these are boons of chemistry which it behoves the farmer to acquaint
himself with. Be it in the lucifer match, or in disinfected sewage, or
in photographs--in bread made without fermentation, or perfumes
extracted from refuse, we may perceive that chemistry affects all our
industries; and that, therefore, knowledge of it concerns every one who
is directly or indirectly connected with our industries.

Of the Concrete sciences, we come first to Astronomy. Out of this has
grown that art of navigation which has made possible the enormous
foreign commerce that supports a large part of our population, while
supplying us with many necessaries and most of our luxuries.

Geology, again, is a science knowledge of which greatly aids industrial
success. Now that iron ores are so large a source of wealth; now that
the duration of our coal-supply has become a question of great interest;
now that we have a College of Mines and a Geological Survey; it is
scarcely needful to enlarge on the truth that the study of the Earth's
crust is important to our material welfare.

And then the science of life--Biology: does not this, too, bear
fundamentally on these processes of indirect sel