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SCIENCE
IN
Short Chapters.

BY
W. MATTIEU WILLIAMS, F.R.A.S., F.C.S.
AUTHOR OF

“The Fuel of the Sun,” “Through Norway with a Knapsack,”
“A Simple Treatise on Heat,” etc.

New York:
JOHN B. ALDEN, Publisher.
1883.

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I am not aware that this reprint of some of my scatterednotes and essays demands any apology.

The practice of making such collections and selectionsby the author himself has now become very general, and ismuch better done thus than by friends after his death.

Besides this, it supplies a growing want of these busytimes, when so many of us are prevented by the strugglesof business from sitting down to the consecutive systematicstudy of a formal treatise.

I have kept this demand steadily in view throughout, byselecting subjects which are likely to be interesting to allreaders who are sufficiently intelligent to prefer sober factto sensational fiction, but who, at the same time, do notprofess to be scientific specialists.

In the writing of these papers my highest literary ambitionhas always been to combine clearness and simplicitywith some attempt at philosophy.

W. M. W.

Willesden, September, 1882.

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