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Updated: June 6, 2025
While I received much benefit from the lectures on natural history at the university, I could not fall in with the views held there as to fixed forms crystallography, mineralogy, and natural philosophy. From what I had heard of the natural history lectures of Professor Weiss in Berlin, I felt sure that I could acquire a correct view of both these subjects from him.
Ruskin's method of teaching, as illustrated in "Ethics of the Dust," has been variously pooh-poohed by his critics. It has seemed to some absurd to mix up Theology, and Crystallography, and Political Economy, and Mythology, and Moral Philosophy, with the chatter of school-girls and the romps of the playground.
The last-mentioned aspect, though long suspected, from the investigation of Crystallography, to have in some mysterious way a common basis with the animal and vegetable, was not fully grasped until, in the last few years, we have been able to study in our laboratories the actual evolution, or more correctly devolution, of matter from one form to another; and as all plants and animals are found to be built up of the same identical protoplasmic cells, so are we now able to break down and analyse not only these cells but even the very structure of matter, and find that all substances are built up of exactly the same bricks, the different forms known to us as Elements being the designs of the great Architect upon which each structure has been built; and these completed designs again are used and become the "ashlars" of the higher forms of plant and animal structure.
The animal was classified very nearly after the manner adopted in crystallography. Structure was everything; life, with its highest prerogatives, intellect, instinct, did not count, was not worthy of admission into the zoological scheme. It is true that an almost exclusively necrological study is obligatory at first.
The other scientific articles are mostly written in a clear, unpretending style, with a sparing use of technical expressions; and so far as we have discovered, they do ample justice to all recent discoveries. The articles by Professor Bache on the "Tides," Professor Dalton on "Embryology," Professor J.D. Dana on "Crystallography," Dr.
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