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Updated: April 30, 2025
The branch of astronomy which determines the course of the stars and the return of eclipses being once known, there is no more dispute among astronomers. In England one does not say "I am a Newtonian, a Lockian, a Halleyan." Why? Those who have read cannot refuse their assent to the truths taught by these three great men.
The Earl of Lumley, lost in his chemical studies with a more than Newtonian absorption, suffers his young wife to form a sentimental friendship with a scoundrel of an Italian novelist, Signor D'Orelli.
That battle was lost in advance; and so is this. The Newtonian Theory is already annihilated, while the gentlemen still think their adversary despicable. Forgive my boasting; I am just as little ashamed of it as those gentlemen are of their pettiness. I am going through a strange experience with Kugelchen, as I have done with many others.
Prejudiced, no doubt, in favor of his own metaphysical views, Leibnitz himself misapprehended the principles of the Newtonian philosophy, and endeavored to demonstrate the truths in the Principia by the application of different principles.
His examination of the Newtonian procedure showed him that the whole mistake rested on the fact that 'a complicated phenomenon should have been taken as a basis, and the simpler explained from the complex'. Nevertheless, it still needed 'much time and application in order to wander through all the labyrinths with which Newton had been pleased to confuse his successors'.
It accordingly forms part of the large sum of Fraunhofer's merits to have secured this inestimable advantage to observers. Sir John Herschel considered that Lassell's application of equatoreal mounting to a nine-inch Newtonian in 1840 made an epoch in the history of "that eminently British instrument, the reflecting telescope."
Thus it was very reasonably deemed an essential requisite of any true theory of the causes of the celestial motions, that it should lead by deduction to Kepler’s laws; which, accordingly, the Newtonian theory did.
When the mathematicians of the continent entered upon the same career, when they wished to establish the Newtonian system upon an incontrovertible basis, and to improve the tables of astronomy, they actually found in their way difficulties which the genius of Newton had failed to surmount.
Two distinguished amateurs, meanwhile, were preparing to reassert on behalf of reflecting instruments their claim to the place of honour in the van of astronomical discovery. Of Mr. Lassell's specula something has already been said. The capabilities of the Newtonian plan were developed still more fully it might almost be said to the uttermost by the enterprise of an Irish nobleman.
The vortices did not, indeed, explain all the phenomena which the Newtonian theory was ultimately found to account for, such as the precession of the equinoxes; but this phenomenon was not, at the time, in the contemplation of either party, as one of the facts to be accounted for. All the facts which they did contemplate, we may believe on Dr.
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