The limits set to the furnace builder's natural desire to make his furnace as large as possible, and its present shape (an obtuse inverted cone set below an acute upright one, both of them truncated), have been reached in part empirically, and in part by reasoning which is open to question, as indeed are the reasons which will now be offered reservedly for both size and shape.
Remarkable as Hellriegel's discovery was, it merely furnished the explanation of a fact which had been empirically established by the husbandman long before, and had received most intelligent application when the old four-course (or Norfolk) rotation was devised.
By the laryngoscope, invented about 1850 by Manuel Garcia the celebrated singingmaster, and perfected by Johann Czermak (1828-1873) and others, the diseases of the larynx also have been brought into the general light which has been shed on all fields of disease; and many of them, previously known more or less empirically, submitted to precise definition and cure.
On the other hand, if laws of social phenomena, empirically generalized from history, can, when once suggested, be affiliated to the known laws of human nature; if the direction actually taken by the developments and changes of human society, can be seen to be such as the properties of man and of his dwelling-place made antecedently probable, the empirical generalizations are raised into positive laws, and sociology becomes a science."
Under the older-fashioned methods of treating physical geography, the prairies were empirically described as level prairies, rolling prairies, and so on.
