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To the intellectual eminence of her people we owe the germs of science, philosophy, law, and astronomy. The most perfect of all tongues, the Sanskrit, has been the parent of many others, and now that her lustre has faded, and her children fallen into a condition of sloth and superstition, let us, at least, do her historic justice.
The far-reaching consequences of this conception will be dealt with in a later chapter. Here, it is sufficient to say that one of the greatest and most truly patriotic of the Tokugawa shoguns himself unwittingly sowed the seeds of disaffection destined to prove fatal to his own family. Yoshimune was fond of astronomy.
It is remarkable that astronomy, sculpture, painting, poetry, oratory, and even ethical philosophy, had made great progress thousands of years before the era of the manufacturing and mechanic arts.
And there were many other things that I do not now remember. It seems as if he felt himself able to do all things. I believe he did make a magnificent equestrian statue of the duke's father. And he studied botany and astronomy, anatomy and mathematics, and all sorts of things besides. I really do not see how he could have got much painting in."
So that the business of astronomy, in these days, is no sinecure, as the reader perceives. And by another evidence, it is continually becoming less of a sinecure. Formerly, one or two men, Tycho, suppose, or, in a later age, Cassini and Horrox, and Bradley, had observatories: one man, suppose, observed the stars for all Christendom; and the rest of Europe observed him.
Astronomy is regarded as a wonderfully exact science because an eclipse can be computed one hundred years in advance to the fraction of a second, yet astronomers differ in regard to the distance of the sun from the earth to the trifling extent of six million miles. Shall we therefore reject astronomy? Phrenology is not a fully-developed science. I am glad it is not.
A coast survey observer had once let me look through his transit instrument and try to observe the passage of a star. On the eclipse expedition mentioned in the last chapter I had used a sextant. This was about all the experience in practical astronomy which I could claim. In fact I had never been inside of an observatory, except on two or three occasions at Cambridge as a visitor.
This is the same scheme of expression as we see in the cathedral at Laon; the paraphrase in sculpture of scholastic theology, and a rendering in images of the text of Albertus Magnus, who, after rehearsing the perfections of the Virgin, declares that She possessed a perfect knowledge of the seven arts: grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music all the lore of the Middle Ages.
The effect is much the same upon your personal hope of accomplishing some good in the world as when a professor of astronomy takes you over to the observatory, lets you look through the telescope, tells you that light takes something like eight minutes to come the 95,000,000 miles from the sun to the earth, and then says that the sun after all is a pretty poor thing considered in connection with what other suns there are.
Stimulated by their acquaintance with the works of Ptolemy and Euclid, Galenus and Hippocrates, they extended their researches into the dominions of astronomy, mathematics, and medicine. The religious orders of the knights, a product of the Crusades, found their antitype in similar organisations of the Moslems, orders that had exactly the same tendencies and regulations.
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