A History Of The Theory Of Elasticity And Of The Strength Of Materials V2 (e-book) (used book) | bookbook.eu

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Excerpt from A History of the Theory of Elasticity and of the Strength of Materials, Vol. 2: From Galilei to the Present Time
Man hat aber erst angefangen die Gesetze der Elasticitat in ihrem ganzen Umfange zu studiren; bei jedem Schritte stosst man in diesen Untersuchungen auf neue Eigenschaften der elastischen Korper; je weiter man vorgeht desto mehr Verwickelung. Bei solchen Umstanden ist wohl in diesem Augenblick keine vollig abgeschlossene Arbeit uber irgend eine Eigenschaft der elastischen Korper moglich.
I cannot doubt but that these things, which now seem to us so mysterious, will be no mysteries at all; that the scales will fall from our eyes; that we shall learn to look on things in a different way - when that which is now a difficulty will be the only common-sense and intelligible way of looking at the subject.
Works of this nature form, as it were, the principal fund of the science property of mankind, the interest of which we may turn to further profit. We might compare them to a capital invested in land. Like the soil, of which landed property consists, the knowledge stored up in these catalogues, lexicons, etc., may have but slender attractions for the vulgar, the man unacquainted with the subject can have no idea of the labour and cost at which the soil has been prepared; the work of the husbandman appears to him terribly toilsome, tedious and clumsy. But although the work of the lexicographer and physical science cataloguer calls for the same painful and persevering industry as the labour of the husbandman, we must not therefore hastily assume that the work itself is of an inferior character, or that it is as dry and mechanical as it at first appears when we have the catalogue or lexicon ready printed before us. For it is necessary in such compilations that all the isolated facts should be selected by careful observation, and afterwards tested and compared with one another, the essential sifted from the unessential, - and all this it is plain, he only can efficiently accomplish who has clearly conceived the end and aim of his work, and the scope and method of the branch of science which it concerns; but for such an one each minute detail will have its own peculiar interest from its position in relation to the whole science of which it is a part. Were it not so, such work would indeed be the worst kind of mental drudgery it were possible to conceive.
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