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He thought that these discoveries proved the truth of the Copernican theory of the Earth's motion; and he urged this view on friends and foes alike. Although in frequent correspondence with Kepler, he never alluded to the New Astronomy, and wrote to him extolling the virtue of epicycles.
Well, the Captain is older than me, I think, which is one of the requisites, and he could teach me astronomy, no doubt, and show me how to box the compass; in return for which, I could show him how to box an adversary's nose, as practised by the best authorities of the ring.
No man could talk to me as he did that night unless he had known something of geography as well as astronomy. He often commented or talked to me about what he had read, seemed to read it out of the book as he went along. He was the learned boy among us unlearned folks. He took great pains to explain; could do it so simply. He was diffident, too."
In the next thirteen reigns nothing special is noted save attention to civil affairs, occasional conquests, and “a great plague.” The twentieth sovereign, called Huascar-Titupac, “gave all the provinces new governors of royal blood, and introduced in the army a cuirass made of cotton and copper.” The twenty-first, Manco-Capac-Amauta, “being addicted to astronomy, convened a scientific council, which agreed that the sun was at a greater distance from the earth than the moon, and that they followed different courses.” In the next twelve reigns, wars, conquests, and some indications of religious controversy are noted.
In an animate body, however small, there abides something of which we get no trace in the vast reaches of astronomy, a kind of activity that is incalculable, indeterminate, and super-mechanical, not lawless, but making its own laws, and escaping from the iron necessity that rules in the inorganic world.
Former ages were much superior in this regard. Two fundamental requisites are necessary for the knowledge of our subject. They are the knowledge of God, and performance of his will. For this purpose we must understand the works of the philosophers. But these in turn require a knowledge of the preliminary sciences of arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy, and logic.
"I fancy she will come to all of you," said Madame. "Except Miss Babbitt. You can write and read, I dare say, Miss Randolph?" she went on with a smile. I answered of course. "What have been your principal studies for the past year?" I said, mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy and history. "Then she is mine!" exclaimed Mlle. Genevieve. "She is older than she looks," said Miss Babbitt.
One of these crazes was astronomy, and another was mud-baths, and another was open windows and long walks in the open air, and another was skin-diseases and nervous disorders, and another was the Lost Tribes, and another was Woman's Education; with the Second Advent and Vegetable Diet to fill up the spaces.
How little do we know of astronomy? Where's our philosopher? What master of eloquence could indure to hear it so murdred in a pulpit? What wise man cou'd suffer the noise?
"But," as Sir G. Cornwall Lewis remarks, "modern astronomy is a science of pure curiosity, and is directed exclusively to the extension of knowledge in a field which human interests can never enter.
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