BINDING OF ISAAC CHAOS SERIES

Many are the men, small and great, old and new, landsmen and seamen, who have at large or in little, written of the whale. Nevertheless, though of real knowledges there be little, yet of books there are plenty and so in some small degree, with cetology, or the science of whales.

Thus speak of the whale, the great Cuvier, and John Hunter, and Lesson, those lights of zoology and anatomy. вЂњUnfitness to pursue our research in the unfathomable waters.вЂќ вЂњImpenetrable veil covering our knowledge of the cetacea.вЂќ вЂњA field strewn with thorns.вЂќ вЂњAll these incomplete indications but serve to torture us naturalists.вЂќ * * * Utter confusion exists among the historians of this animalвЂќ (sperm whale), says Surgeon Beale.

вЂњIt is not my intention, were it in my power, to enter into the inquiry as to the true method of dividing the cetacea into groups and families. вЂњNo branch of Zoology is so much involved as that which is entitled Cetology,вЂќ says Captain Scoresby, A.D. Listen to what the best and latest authorities have laid down. The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed. It is some systematised exhibition of the whale in his broad genera, that I would now fain put before you. It is a movement as of light spreading itself over a waste of obscurity, as of law diffusing order throughout a wilderness of confusion, and there is surely in its contemplation something of the pleasure which attends the spectacle of a beautiful daybreak, something of the grandeur belonging to the conception of a world created out of chaos. It is the great movement of modern chemistry that we have thus, for an hour, seen passing before us.

BINDING OF ISAAC CHAOS SERIES

For now, by the aid of a few general principles, we find ourselves able to unravel the complexities of these formulae, to marshal the compounds which they represent in orderly series nay, even to multiply their numbers at our will, and in a great measure to forecast their nature ere we have called them into existence. A sense of mastery and power succeeds in our minds to the sort of weary despair with which we at first contemplated their formidable array. The intricate formulae that hang upon these walls, and the boundless variety of phenomena they illustrate, are beginning to be for us as a labyrinth once impassable, but to which we have at length discovered the clue. I have succeeded in convincing you that modern chemistry is not, as it has so long appeared, an ever-growing accumulation of isolated facts, as impossible for a single intellect to co-ordinate as for a single memory to grasp.

Binding of isaac chaos