This supposition by no means requires that the effect should not, during its progress, undergo many modifications besides those of quantity, or that it should not sometimes appear to undergo a very marked change of character. This may be either because the unknown cause consists of several component elements or agents, whose effects, accumulating according to different laws, are compounded in different proportions at different periods in the existence of the organized being; or because, at certain points in its progress, fresh causes or agencies come in, or are evolved, which intermix their laws with those of the prime agent.
CHAPTER XVI.
Of Empirical Laws.
§ 1. Scientific inquirers give the name of Empirical Laws to those uniformities which observation or experiment has shown to exist, but on which they hesitate to rely in cases varying much from those which have been actually observed, for want of seeing any reason why such a law should exist. It is implied, therefore, in the notion of an empirical law, that it is not an ultimate law; that if true at all, its truth is capable of being, and requires to be, accounted for. It is a derivative law, the derivation of which is not yet known. To state the explanation, the why, of the empirical law, would be to state the laws from which it is derived—the ultimate causes on which it is contingent. And if we knew these, we should also know what are its limits; under what conditions it would cease to be fulfilled.
The periodical return of eclipses, as originally ascertained by the persevering observation of the early Eastern astronomers, was an empirical law, until the general laws of the celestial motions had accounted for it. The following are empirical laws still waiting to be resolved into the simpler laws from which they are derived: the local laws of the flux and reflux of the tides in different places; the succession of certain kinds of weather to certain appearances of sky; the apparent exceptions to the almost universal truth that bodies expand by increase of temperature; the law that breeds, both animal and vegetable, are improved by crossing; that gases have a strong tendency to permeate animal membranes; that substances containing a very high proportion of nitrogen (such as hydrocyanic acid and morphia) are powerful poisons; that when different metals are fused together the alloy is harder than the various elements; that the number of atoms of acid required to neutralize one atom of any base is equal to the number of atoms of oxygen in the base; that the solubility of substances in one another depends,[1] at least in some degree, on the similarity of their elements.
An empirical law, then, is an observed uniformity, presumed to be re-
- ↑ Thus water, of which eight-ninths in weight are oxygen, dissolves most bodies which contain a high proportion of oxygen, such as all the nitrates (which have more oxygen than any others of the common salts), most of the sulphates, many of the carbonates, etc. Again, bodies largely composed of combustible elements, like hydrogen and carbon, are soluble in bodies of similar composition; resin, for instance, will dissolve in alcohol, tar in oil of turpentine. This empirical generalization is far from being universally true; no doubt because it is a remote, and therefore easily defeated, result of general laws too deep for us at present to penetrate; but it will probably in time suggest processes of inquiry, leading to the discovery of those laws.
