every age remain possessions forever; new discoveries seldom disprove older tenets; seldom is anything lost or wasted.
If it be asked wherein the utility of some modern extensions of mathematics lies, it must be acknowledged that it is at present difficult to see how they are ever to become applicable to questions of common life or physical science. But our inability to do this should not be urged as an argument against the pursuit of such studies. In the first place, we know neither the day nor the hour when these abstract developments will find application in the mechanic arts, in physical science, or in other branches of mathematics. For example, the whole subject of graphical statics, so useful to the practical engineer, was made to rest upon von Staudt's Geometrie der Lage; Hamilton's "principle of varying action" has its use in astronomy; complex quantities, general integrals, and general theorems in integration offer advantages in the study of electricity and magnetism. "The utility of such researches," says Spottiswoode,[57] "can in no case be discounted, or even imagined beforehand. Who, for instance, would have supposed that the calculus of forms or the theory of substitutions would have thrown much light upon ordinary equations; or that Abelian functions and hyperelliptic transcendents would have told us anything about the properties of curves; or that the calculus of operations would have helped us in any way towards the figure of the earth?" A second reason in favour of the pursuit of advanced mathematics, even when there is no promise of practical application, is this, that mathematics, like poetry and music, deserves cultivation for its own sake.
The great characteristic of modern mathematics is its generalising tendency. Nowadays little weight is given to isolated theorems, "except as affording hints of an unsuspected new sphere of thought, like meteorites detached from some
