Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical

About this book

In an early essay, the physicist James Clerk Maxwell pondered the intelligibility of the universe, contrasting the reassuring image of the book of nature with an intriguing, if somewhat disturbing alternative, the magazine of nature: Perhaps the 'book', as it has been called, of nature is regularly paged; if so, no doubt the introductory parts will explain those that follow, and the methods taught in the first chapters will be taken for granted and used as illustrations in the more advanced parts of the course; but if it is not a 'book' at all, but a magazine, nothing is more foolish to suppose than that one part can throw light on another.