"We now propose to enter more minutely into subject of our inquiries, and at the same time, without making the history of mechanics the chief topic discussion, to consider its historical development so far as this is requisite to an understanding of the present state of mechanical science... Apart from the consideration that we cannot afford to neglect the great incentives that it is in our power to derive from the foremost intellects of all epochs, incentives which taken as a whole are more fruitful than the greatest men of the present day are able to offer, there is no grander, no more intellectually elevating spectacle than that of the utterances of the fundamental investigators in their gigantic power. Possessed as yet of no methods, for these were created by their labors, and are only rendered comprehensible to us by their performances, they grapple with and subjugate the object of their inquiry, and imprint upon it the forms of conceptual thought. They that know the entire course of the development of science, will, as a matter of course, judge more freely and more correctly of the significance of any present scientific movement than they, who limited in their views, to the age in which their own lives have been spent, contemplate merely the momentary trend that the course of intellectual events takes at the present moment."