The laws, thus explained or resolved, are sometimes said to be accounted for; but the expression is incorrect, if taken to mean any thing more than what has been already stated. In minds not habituated to accurate thinking, there is often a confused notion that the general laws are the causes of the partial ones; that the law of general gravitation, for example, causes the phenomenon of the fall of bodies to the earth. But to assert this would be a misuse of the word cause: terrestrial gravity is not an effect of general gravitation, but a case of it; that is, one kind of the particular instances in which that general law obtains. To account for a law of nature means, and can mean, nothing more than to assign other laws more general, together with collocations, which laws and collocations being supposed, the partial law follows without any additional supposition.
CHAPTER XIII.
Miscellaneous Examples of the Explanation of Laws of Nature.
§ 1. The most striking example which the history of science presents, of the explanation of laws of causation and other uniformities of sequence among special phenomena, by resolving them into laws of greater simplicity and generality, is the great Newtonian generalization; respecting which typical instance, so much having already been said, it is sufficient to call attention to the great number and variety of the special observed uniformities, which are in this case accounted for, either as particular cases, or as consequences, of one very simple law of universal nature. The simple fact of a tendency of every particle of matter toward every other particle, varying inversely as the square of the distance, explains the fall of bodies to the earth, the revolutions of the planets and satellites, the motions (so far as known) of comets, and all the various regularities which have been observed in these special phenomena; such as the elliptical orbits, and the variations from exact ellipses; the relation between the solar distances of the planets and the duration of their revolutions; the precession of the equinoxes; the tides, and a vast number of minor astronomical truths.
Mention has also been made in the preceding chapter of the explanation of the phenomena of magnetism from laws of electricity; the special laws of magnetic agency having been affiliated by deduction to observed laws of electric action, in which they have ever since been considered to be included as special cases. An example not so complete in itself, but even more fertile in consequences, having been the starting-point of the really scientific study of physiology, is the affiliation, commenced by Bichat, and carried on by subsequent biologists, of the properties of the bodily organs, to the elementary properties of the tissues into which they are anatomically decomposed.
Another striking instance is afforded by Dalton's generalization, commonly known as the atomic theory. It had been known from the very commencement of accurate chemical observation, that any two bodies combine chemically with one another in only a certain number of proportions; but those proportions were in each case expressed by a percentage—so many parts (by weight) of each ingredient, in 100 of the compound (say 35 and a fraction of one element, 64 and a fraction of the other); in which mode of statement no relation was perceived between the proportion in
